/lc-from-paper¶

Reproduce a published scientific paper as a complete ASTRA project. The skill is ORIENT-first and ralph-driven. ORIENT runs in the user's main session — figuring out what the user wants, standing up the paper and code substrate, and drafting the per-paper constitution. A ralph loop then carries the long middle — ARCHITECT → SPECIFY → LITERATURE → IMPLEMENT → RUN → COMPARE — across many iterations against the same constitution. REVIEW returns to the user's main session once the loop closes.

/lc-from-paper is the entry point of the paper-reproduction bundle. Sibling skills (ralph for the loop, paper-extraction, narrative, figure-comparison, check-sentence-by-sentence) live in the same plugin and are invoked by role across the phases.

Source: claude/lightcone/skills/lc-from-paper/SKILL.md.

Architecture¶

Two pieces.

1. Interactive bookends in the user's main session. ORIENT and REVIEW are conversations with the user. ORIENT runs in stages — ask for the paper, run /paper-extraction inline, interview (grounded in the paper), clone the code and run /lc-from-code scan-only (if a repo exists), optionally follow up, then draft constitution.md + CLAUDE.md from the full paper-plus-code context for user review.

2. A ralph loop for the long middle. Once ORIENT lands — constitution.md drafted, paper and code substrate on disk — /lc-from-paper launches a ralph loop against the constitution. Each iteration starts a fresh tmux-detached Claude session with the constitution loaded into its system prompt, surveys the workdir, picks the next valuable move (typically one phase's worth of work), does it, commits, and exits. Iteration N+1 reads N's work cold, so per-phase review collapses into "the next iteration is the review." Parallel fan-out (LITERATURE Haiku quote-finders, SPECIFY per-sub-analysis work, IMPLEMENT per-output work) happens inside an iteration, one level deep from the iteration's main session.

Phases¶

Eight phases, zero-indexed. ORIENT + REVIEW run in the user's main session; phases 1–6 run as ralph iterations.

ORIENT stages¶

ORIENT is one phase executed in seven stages, each grounded in what the earlier stages produced:

1. Ask for the paper in prose (the answer is free-form: arXiv ID, DOI, or PDF path). No AskUserQuestion here — it's the wrong shape for a free-form string.
2. Run /paper-extraction <id> inline and read the substrate it produced — index.json, abstract, conclusions, data/code availability, acknowledgements. This grounds every subsequent question.
3. Interview the user with AskUserQuestion for scope, fidelity intent, code repo confirmation, paper-specific conventions, prior familiarity, and external context — each question referencing the paper's actual figures, claims, and structure.
4. Clone the reference code and run /lc-from-code scan-only (skip cleanly when no public code repo exists). The scan produces code-index.md — the iterations' code surface.
5. Optional follow-up questions if the code-index surfaced something that affects scope or constitution shape. Usually skipped.
6. Draft constitution.md + CLAUDE.md — both files now informed by paper and code substrate. The constitution's Scope and sub-analysis decomposition can lean on the actual pipeline.
7. **User reviews drafts → refine → single first commit (constitution
8. CLAUDE + paper substrate + code substrate) → launch the ralph loop.**

Per-paper substrate: constitution + CLAUDE.md¶

ORIENT drafts two files in the reproduction workdir; every iteration picks them up on launch.

• constitution.md — the ralph loop's driving document, task-bound. YAML frontmatter declares status: active. Goal (carrying the fidelity intent — the user's own "what do you want out of this stretch, given what you have to spend on it"), Scope (in/out), Quality bar, Evidence (paper DOI, arXiv ID, code repo URL), Open dimensions (decisions worth user ratification, updated each iteration). The body sharpens slowly. Archivable once the reproduction closes.
• CLAUDE.md — the auto-loading walk-up, durable. Paper identity at the top; Rules (code-as-canonical, no blocking on AskUserQuestion mid-iteration, arXiv-LaTeX-first, astra validate --verify-evidence as the fidelity gate); Disagreements log (running); Open opportunities (gaps that future work could tighten); Pointers. Stays useful for any follow-on work in this directory.

Pointers, not snapshots.

Disciplines¶

• Workdir is the state. File existence, git log, and astra validate answer "what phase am I on" deterministically — no separate state machine.
• Constitution is task-bound; CLAUDE.md is durable. The constitution carries what this reproduction is trying to achieve and how it's progressing — archivable once the reproduction closes. CLAUDE.md carries what stays useful past the reproduction: paper identity, rules, paper-vs-code disagreements, pointers to substrate. Keep both current so the next cold survey reads them as fact.
• Code-as-canonical, with disagreements recorded. Where paper and code disagree on something material, code wins for numerics, but the disagreement is preserved as a decision option and noted in CLAUDE.md.
• Rigor is a trajectory toward the user's intent. Fidelity intent is partly aesthetic ("how good does this need to be?") and partly pragmatic ("what's feasible given the compute, tokens, and wall-clock available?"). The honest meta-conversation lives in ORIENT. There's no explicit review state machine: every iteration reads the most recent artifact critically as part of survey, fixes what needs fixing or advances if nothing does. The fresh-context property at iteration boundaries makes the next iteration the review. Gaps the intent wants pushed further than the loop has time to deliver become Open opportunities in CLAUDE.md for a future loop.
• arXiv LaTeX first. PDF + Docling is the non-arXiv fallback only.
• No synthetic data. Unless the paper itself uses synthetic data, every input must be real.
• Open questions for autonomous iteration. Iterations run detached in tmux, so AskUserQuestion isn't available. Questions go to open-questions.md with the iteration's best-judgment default applied; the user resolves them at REVIEW close-out.

Anti-patterns¶

• Doing the long middle in the user's main session instead of launching the loop. ORIENT and REVIEW belong in the main session; ARCHITECT through COMPARE belong in iterations.
• Asking an iteration to use AskUserQuestion — iterations are detached.
• Re-implementing what astra already does (astra validate, astra paper add).
• Bundling phases into one iteration — defeats fresh-context review.
• Accreting amendment sections in constitution.md — reshape, don't append.

Related¶

• Bundle README — why the bundle is co-located rather than a separate plugin install.
• /ralph — the loop substrate (authoring + launching + iterating).
• /paper-extraction — ORIENT Stage 2's acquisition path; also invoked per cited paper by LITERATURE.
• /narrative — ARCHITECT's structural narrative and SPECIFY's anchored content narrative.
• /figure-comparison — REVIEW (mandatory) and also user-invokable.
• /check-sentence-by-sentence — REVIEW (opt-in) and also user-invokable.