Idea Evaluator

Overview

This skill evaluates a preliminary research idea from the combined perspective of a top-venue reviewer and an experienced advisor. It scores the idea against five improvement dimensions from the idea-generation guide (Higher, Faster, Stronger, Cheaper, Broader), matches the idea's lifecycle against the user's actual capability and available hours per week, probes whether the idea has paradigm-shift potential, flags fatal flaws, and returns one of three verdicts: Strong Accept, Accept with Revisions, or Reject and Pivot.

The goal is to kill weak ideas before the student invests months, and to shape promising-but-underdeveloped ideas into stronger forms before writing begins.

When to use this skill

• The user has a draft idea and asks whether it is worth pursuing.
• The user asks for novelty check, feasibility assessment, or scoring.
• Before the user commits to a paper scope or starts implementation.
• The user is comparing two or three candidate ideas and needs a structured trade-off.
• The user suspects scope creep and wants an external check.
• The user mentions 'evaluate this idea', 'score this idea', 'assess feasibility', or 'is this a good research direction'.

When NOT to use this skill

• The user has already implemented the idea and is writing the paper. Use intro-drafter, tech-paper-template, or benchmark-paper-template (separate plugin) instead.
• The user explicitly wants brainstorming of new ideas from scratch. Use plain conversation; see handbook 2.3 for a disruptive-innovation playbook.
• The user asks for review of an existing manuscript. Use pre-submission-reviewer.
• The user asks to evaluate a benchmark contribution specifically. Use benchmark-paper-template (separate plugin) in targeted mode.

Core procedure

Step 1: First impression and paper-type positioning