# World First > Use when the goal is to produce and defensibly claim a genuine world-first, invention, novel algorithm/protocol/kernel/mechanism, or "nobody has done this" capability — and to prove the claim rather than assert it. Triggers on intent like "invent", "world-first", "first-ever", "beat the incumbent with something new", "break all dogma", "is this novel?", "prove this is new", or any push to build a mechanism a competitor structurally cannot. Also use to audit an in-flight "first" claim for overclaim before it ships, is committed, benchmarked-for-publication, or sent externally. This is the packaging of the INVENTION PLAYBOOK: confirmed-limit entry → TRIZ ideation → the removed-constraint test → refute-then-build vs a tuned baseline → provenance search → certify → kill failure modes. Reach for it by default on invention and novelty-claim work; skip only for routine feature work with no novelty claim attached. - Skill: `88plug/world-first` (Agent Skill, multi-file: 4 files) - Install (CLI): `npx skillmds@latest add 88plug/world-first` - Raw SKILL.md: https://api.skillmd.com/api/skills/88plug/world-first/raw - Safety review: pending - Works with: Claude Code, Claude.ai, OpenAI Codex - Category: Security - Author: 88plug (https://skillmd.com/u/88plug) - Updated: 2026-09-17 - Page: https://skillmd.com/skills/88plug/world-first --- # World-First An invention is a **measured delta past a confirmed limit, proven novel against a searched corpus, and reproducible by someone who is not you.** Everything in this skill exists to make each of those four clauses true *before* the word "first" is used. The failure mode this skill prevents is the confident-but-wrong "first-ever!" that dies in review — you would rather be slow-and-true than fast-and-impressive. This skill is the operational packaging of the invention pipeline. It **composes with `scientific-method`'s `invent.md`** (the falsification→invention engine, provenance protocol, certification ladder, claim charts) — read that reference for the deep machinery. What this skill adds is the *entry discipline* (a confirmed limit, never a hunch), the **removed-constraint test** (the single strongest generator of a real systems first), the **dogma-mining** move for finding unclaimed territory, and a **candidate-first template** you fill in. **Before writing any code against an API, kernel contract, or FFI boundary, invoke `read-the-damn-docs`.** Inventions die on stale-memory API guesses more than on bad ideas — a wrong launch contract produces garbage output that looks like a failed invention when it was a failed lookup. Ground the mechanism in what the docs/types/source actually say for the version in play, then cite it. ## The gate that comes first: a CONFIRMED limit Do not start an invention campaign from "wouldn't it be cool if." Start from a **measured wall** — a number you have confirmed is real and that the current approach cannot cross. No confirmed limit → no campaign. The reason is Bayesian: without a measured limit you cannot tell a real invention from a mechanism that "wins" only because the baseline was never tuned. The limit is also your acceptance bar — pre-register the quantified effect, the named baseline, and the scope *before* you build. If you cannot yet name the wall, that is the task: measure it. Proving a target **impossible** (the impossibility toolkit in `invent.md` §5) is a first-class result worth more than a forged pass — an oracle-ceiling or conservation bound that rules out the whole class is itself a defensible finding. ## The pipeline (seven steps) 1. **Frame** — write the acceptance criteria as a falsifiable number: `mechanism M achieves effect E vs tuned baseline B on scope S`. Measure B first, at its *best* configuration (not defaults — beating a strawman is the #1 invalid win). This is the candidate-first template's top rows; open it now: `references/candidate-first-template.md`. 2. **Ideate with TRIZ + quotas** — a technical contradiction ("lossless AND fewer bytes", "concurrency AND low latency") is the raw material of a real invention. Turn it into inventive moves with the contradiction matrix and the four separation principles. Set a breadth quota and force distinct lenses — identical lenses collapse onto one candidate. Cheat sheet: `references/triz-cheat.md`. 3. **Run the removed-constraint test** — the highest-yield generator for a systems first. Name the incumbent's *mandatory* barrier (a lock, the GIL-serialized scheduler step, symmetric-TP, a global sync). Build the structure that barrier forbids. Then prove your substrate removes *exactly that constraint* — if a lock/GIL-bound engine could express the same mechanism, it is not your first. Full procedure + the dogma-mining move (mine incumbent issues/PRs/won't-fix/roadmap for admitted walls): `references/removed-constraint-test.md`. 4. **Refute, then build** — spawn a **fresh-context refuter** per surviving idea (`scientific-method:refuter`), default-to-refuted when uncertain. The author of an idea must never referee it — you see what you meant, not what you built. Only survivors get built. Then measure vs the tuned baseline and **ablate**: remove each element and see which one carries the win. An invention whose effect vanishes when one incidental detail is removed *is* that detail, renamed. 5. **Provenance-search every surviving mechanism** — no unsearched mechanism is ever called new. Decompose the claim into elements E1..En; run ≥3 query families (synonyms, domain jargon, abbreviations); log venue/date/query/hits. Name the **canonical incumbent** even when you re-derived it, and scope your claim to the *measured delta* against it — not against a strawman. Verdict grammar is fixed: *"closest found X, differs in Y; no anticipating reference in the searched corpus (venues + dates; gaps: Z)."* Never an absolute newness claim. The **TransKV lesson**: the design space being already occupied does not kill you — the *specific mechanization* can still be novel — but it does cap what you may claim. Deep protocol: `invent.md` §2. 6. **Certify on the ladder** — `asserted` → `available` (artifact + exact repro recipe) → `functional` (independently runs) → `reproduced` (independent re-run matches within pre-committed tolerance) → `certified` (independent setup + full disclosure + provenance + adversarial review). **A witness is an artifact, not a sentence** — the independent re-run's harness and output must exist on disk and be re-runnable. A rung claim whose witness is only prose is fabricated verification: it invalidates the whole claim, not just the rung. Your own re-run never grants `reproduced`. Ladder detail: `invent.md` §6. 7. **Kill the failure modes early** — run the checklist below before the word "first" leaves the building. Better to kill a bad invention at step 2 than defend it at step 6. ## Failure-mode checklist (kills a bad "first" early) Score each. Any yes → stop and fix before claiming anything. - **Overclaim** — is the claim an unscoped superlative ("fastest", "first-ever") where the evidence supports only "matches canonical on A/B, improves C by N% on this scope"? Scope to the measured delta. - **Reinventing prior art** — did you provenance-search *before* claiming, or after falling in love with it? Unsearched = not new, full stop. - **Non-problem** — is the confirmed limit a wall anyone actually hits, or a microbenchmark artifact? Name who is blocked by it. - **Novel-but-perf-neutral** — does the mechanism *move a number that matters*? A genuinely novel structure that is measurement-neutral on the real workload is a curiosity, not an invention. (Our own fused-KV+MTP was novel and perf-neutral single-GPU — honest kill.) - **Premature-first** — did a fresh-context refuter try to break it before you believed it? No refute pass → it is an unverified hypothesis, not a finding. - **Strawman baseline** — is B the incumbent's *best* config, or its defaults? - **Verifier grants the win** — does the test harness secretly hand the mechanism something a real deployment won't (a shared counter as a coordination channel, a fixed envelope the win rides on)? Re-run at a matched envelope and break the affordance. (`invent.md` §3.) ## Fan-out shape (parallelism the campaign wants) Invention is a fan-out problem — independent perspectives beat one context iterating on itself. The default shape: - **Ideation fan-out** — N agents, one distinct TRIZ lens or removed-constraint angle each, blind to each other (forced diversity). Merge, dedup. - **Refute gate** — one fresh `scientific-method:refuter` per surviving candidate, in parallel. Default-to-refuted. Survivors only. - **Council for judgment calls** — when the call is interpretive ("is this mechanism actually distinct from PagedAttention?"), spawn 3–5 `scientific-method:council-member` seats on *different models*, blind, each with its own read-only probes. Councils settle judgment, not empirics — empirical questions go to experiments. - **Peer-review before any external "first" claim** — after a finding survives refute and before it is built-on, merged, published, or sent out, run a peer-review round: 3–5 `scientific-method:peer-reviewer` seats, one lens each (soundness, prior-art/provenance, reproducibility, significance, fatal-flaw), then one `scientific-method:meta-reviewer` to close. Weigh evidence, don't count votes — one failed reproduction outweighs three approving skims. Peer-review and provenance are the two gates that stand between a real first and a retracted one. Do not skip them because the result feels obviously novel — the obvious-novelty feeling is exactly when overclaim ships. ## The one-sentence version Measure the wall, name the barrier the incumbent cannot remove, build what the barrier forbade, let a stranger try to break it, search the world for who did it first, and only then — scoped to the number you actually moved — say "first".