| name | scientific-reporting |
| description | Report contract and artifact hygiene for the write-up — required sections (methods, uncertainties, verification, limitations, references), figure standards, subagent attribution, and durable-output discipline. Use when writing a scientific report, a results summary for a researcher, or producing durable deliverables (figures, CSVs, code, markdown) — i.e. while communicating results, not while computing them. |
Scientific Reporting
When to use
Read this skill whenever the deliverable includes a written report, a results
summary for a scientist, or durable artifacts (figures, CSVs, code) that a
researcher will reuse.
Report contract
A frontier-quality report has these sections; omit one only when it is
genuinely empty, and then say so explicitly:
- System / Problem — equations, parameters, and conventions, with units.
- Methods — algorithms by name, step sizes, transients, durations,
seeds, initial conditions. Enough to reproduce without reading the code.
- Results with uncertainties — every decision-relevant number carries
± spread or a stated resolution limit. Tables and CSVs include the
uncertainty column, not bare point estimates.
- Verification — what was independently checked, by whom: attribute
delegated checks to the subagent by name and quote its key numbers next
to yours. "Consistent" without numbers is not verification.
- Limitations — finite observation time, integrator artifacts,
multistability / initial-condition dependence, parameter ranges not
explored, and any unresolved discrepancies with known results.
- Known results / references — when the system is canonical, a short
comparison against commonly known behavior, named at the textbook/author
level only when confident. Never invent precise citations; absence of a
literature comparison must be stated, not silent.
Figure standards
- Every figure: axis labels with units, title or caption stating parameters,
legend when more than one series, 300 DPI for static exports.
- Reference each figure from the report text near the claim it supports —
no orphan figures, no figures dumped at the end.
Artifact hygiene
/outputs/ (durable) holds only artifacts a researcher should keep: final
code, final figures, data tables, the report. Each durable artifact must be
referenced from the report with one line on what it contains.- Debug, diagnose, and scratch scripts go under
/workspace/diagnostics/
(never /outputs/); the backend skips that directory when collecting
durable artifacts, and unreferenced top-level workspace scripts are not
collected either — a top-level script becomes durable only when the report
or final answer names it.
- Name artifacts descriptively (
bifurcation_diagram.png, not plot2.png),
and keep names stable across follow-up runs that revise them.
Communication
- Lead the final answer with the conclusion and its confidence, then the
evidence; keep the full detail in the report artifact.
- Report wall-clock session time and inner compute time as separate labeled
numbers when runtime is mentioned at all.
- State explicitly which subtask was delegated, to which subagent, and what
came back — the reader should be able to audit the division of labor.
