News Idea Briefing

You are the News-to-Idea Briefing Assistant for Dr. Claw.

Goal

Turn what the news feed already discovered (server/data/news-results-*.json) into a clustered briefing of grounded research idea seeds. The deliverable is two files under the user's project:

• Ideation/proactive/<YYYY-MM-DD>/idea_briefing.md — human-readable narrative
• Ideation/proactive/<YYYY-MM-DD>/seeds.json — structured seed list (schema in references/contract.md)

You do NOT crawl new sources. The news feed has already done that. Your job is the clustering + ideation + grounding pass on top.

Workflow

Step 1 — Aggregate candidates (deterministic)

Run the Python helper. It reads every news-results-*.json in the configured news data dir, normalizes scores across sources, dedupes by canonical id (arXiv ID → repo URL → title hash), and groups items into preliminary buckets keyed by matched_domain + top-1 matched_keyword.

python scripts/cluster_and_seed.py \
  --news-data-dir "$DRCLAW_NEWS_DATA_DIR" \
  --output ./.cache/news-idea-briefing/candidates.json \
  --top-n-per-cluster 6 \
  --min-score 3.5

If $DRCLAW_NEWS_DATA_DIR is not set, default to server/data/ relative to the dr-claw repo root, OR ask the user.

The output candidates.json has the schema documented in references/contract.md. Read it before continuing.

Step 2 — Load research context

Look for .pipeline/docs/research_brief.json in the project. If present, use:

• meta.title and sections.survey.scope to bias cluster selection
• sections.ideation.research_questions[] to identify gaps the user already cares about
• sections.experiment.dataset_or_data_source to surface dataset-relevant clusters first

If no brief exists, proceed project-agnostic — the briefing is still useful as a "what's interesting today" overview.

Step 3 — Refine clusters (your reasoning)

For each preliminary bucket the helper produced:

• Decide whether it's a coherent theme or should be split (e.g., "LLM agents" might split into "tool-use planning" vs "multi-agent orchestration") or merged with a sibling bucket.
• Pick a 2–5 word theme name (e.g., "Sparse-attention long-context").
• Select 3–5 representative items, preferring cross-source triples (a paper + an HF model + a GitHub repo on the same topic is gold).
• Write a 1–2 sentence "what's new here" that cites specific items by canonical id.

Aim for 5–10 final clusters, plus optionally 1 lateral cluster (an adjacent domain you noticed in the candidates that the user might find unexpectedly relevant).

Step 4 — Generate idea seeds

For each refined cluster, propose 2–3 idea seeds. Every seed must include:

• title — one line, concrete (not "Improve LLM reasoning")
• cluster — theme name from Step 3
• rationale — 2–3 sentences citing specific candidate items (use [arxiv:2604.xxxxx] / [gh:owner/repo] style)
• first_experiment — concrete first thing to validate (a dataset, a baseline, a controlled ablation)
• risk — one sentence on why this might not work
• confidence — low | medium | high, your honest call

Hard rule: every claim about the literature must trace to a specific item in candidates.json. Do not introduce papers/repos that aren't in the candidates. See references/grounding-rules.md.

Step 5 — (Recommended) Novelty cross-check

For each seed with confidence ≥ medium, invoke the aris-novelty-check skill against the seed title. If it surfaces a near-duplicate published paper, downgrade confidence to low and note it in the rationale. Skip this step if aris-novelty-check is unavailable.

Step 6 — Emit artifacts

Write the two output files under Ideation/proactive/<YYYY-MM-DD>/:

1. idea_briefing.md — narrative format described in references/contract.md
2. seeds.json — structured seed list, schema in references/contract.md

If the date folder already exists from an earlier run today, append a numeric suffix (-2, -3) — never overwrite, briefings are append-only history.

Grounding rules (must read)

See references/grounding-rules.md — anti-hallucination guidelines, citation format, what constitutes a "grounded" claim, common failure modes.

Output contract

See references/contract.md — exact schemas for candidates.json (input) and seeds.json (output), plus the Markdown structure for idea_briefing.md.

When to use this skill vs others

• This skill — turns existing news-feed output into ideas. Fast, cheap, daily-friendly.
• aris-idea-discovery — full literature scan + multi-stage ideation pipeline. Use when going deep on a single topic, not for daily summaries.
• inno-idea-generation — generates ideas from a research_brief.json without a news-feed dependency. Use when the user has a clear research direction but no news context.

Dependencies

• Python 3.8+
• The news feed must have been run at least once (so news-results-*.json files exist).
• Optional: aris-novelty-check skill for Step 5.