distill-paper

name	distill-paper
description	Read a paper or product writeup (and its key references) and distill it into a structured, implementable spec: the core mechanism, the claimed metric, a minimal reproduction, and the constraints. Use at the start of adopting a community idea, before reproducing or grafting it.

Status: v0 scaffold — unverified. This runbook's end-to-end behavior has not been validated end-to-end in this repo; it will be hardened against real papers. See ../../STATUS.md.

distill-paper

Turn "I saw an idea in a paper/product" into a spec you can act on — the analog of program.md.

Steps

1. Read with a subagent so heavy reading stays out of the main context.
2. Follow the lineage. Pull the most relevant cited references (and their repos) to recover implicit conventions the paper omits (the AutoReproduce idea).
3. Extract:
   • the core mechanism (what actually changes and why it should help);
   • the claimed metric and dataset/benchmark;
   • a minimal reproduction (smallest setting that should show the effect);
   • the constraints / assumptions (compute, data, preconditions);
   • risks (what the authors gloss over; overfitting, cherry-picked baselines).
4. Emit a structured spec (Markdown) with those sections.

Output

A spec file that downstream skills consume: repro-harness (to confirm) and graft-change (to integrate). Keep claims sourced (links/arXiv ids) so they stay checkable.

Notes

• Distinguish the idea from the paper's framing; you want the transferable mechanism, not the narrative.
• Flag any number you could not verify rather than restating it as fact.