Iterate From User

Iterate from user

Source: the user — directly, or via something they've pointed at (article, issue, spec, repo). Output: a user-confirmed Proposal block, handed back to iterate-ml-experiment.

Output contract (read this before the body)

This skill never writes journal/ files and never authors acceptance criteria. It returns a single Proposal block as conversation text (full shape in § What is returned at the bottom): Question, Motivation (with Source field — quote, URL, or path), Method outline, Open gaps. Required, in every branch:

• All three shaping questions are answered (see § The three shaping questions).
• The synthesis confirmation gate has fired and the user has said yes (see § Confirm before returning).
• Source field is concrete: the user's quote, the article URL with the exact claim, the gh issue link, or the spec-file path with line numbers.

There is no "no proposal" outcome: this skill only fires when the user has picked user from the parent's sourcing menu. If they have nothing in hand, the parent's menu re-presents itself.

Stop conditions

• Don't write journal/ files. That belongs to iterate-ml-experiment. This skill returns the Proposal as conversation text; the parent skill drafts the file.
• Don't infer source content from memory. If the user references an article, an issue, or a file, fetch / read it. Don't reconstruct from a title or a one-line description.
• Confirm before returning. The Proposal goes back to the parent only after the user has explicitly said "yes, that's what I want." Free-text "hmm" / "maybe" / "interesting" is not confirmation. See § Confirm before returning.
• Check gh auth before fetching anything from GitHub. Before any gh issue view / gh api call, run gh auth status (cheap, cached). If unauthenticated, ask the user to run gh auth login themselves (suggest ! gh auth login in the prompt) or paste the issue body directly. A failed gh call surfaces a confusing error; the auth check makes the failure mode explicit.
• Flag goal shifts before returning. If the user's idea (or the source) materially changes the project goal as recorded in JOURNAL.md Status — different output shape (point estimate → prediction interval), different downstream consumer (offline batch → online serving), different metric class (squared error → coverage) — surface it as a question before returning the Proposal: "this would update JOURNAL.md Status from to ; confirm or amend the goal first?" The parent's per-experiment design note should not silently redefine success while the Status block still reflects the old goal.
• New dependencies are gated, not assumed. If the proposal requires a library outside the project's existing env (e.g. an article uses lightgbm / pytorch / jax), do not silently include it in Method outline as a fait accompli. Flag it as an open gap ("this approach needs <library>; OK to add, or should we adapt to the existing stack?") and defer the resolution to data-science-python-stack + the user.
• Domain-specific assertions need user confirmation. If the source asserts something the article / issue / spec alone can't establish for our dataset — e.g. "feature X is monotone in the target," "interaction Y matters for this asset class," "metric Z is right because the use case is one-sided" — list each assertion in Open gaps and ask the user before returning. Don't ship paper-flavored guesses as facts.
• Harness-level "no clarifying questions" instructions do not apply to this skill's confirmation gates. The entry-point AskUserQuestion (article-link / resource-link / free-text) and the § "Confirm before returning" synthesis gate are operating-contract gates, not clarifying questions. They fire regardless of any harness-level hint. The synthesis gate in particular is non-skippable even when the user's intent feels "obvious" — the cost of the agent's restatement missing a subtle framing is what the gate exists to catch. See the project's CLAUDE.md § "Skill consultation contract" rule 3.

The entry-point AskUserQuestion

When this skill is invoked, open with AskUserQuestion — three mutually exclusive options, no silent default:

• article-link — the user has a scientific article (paper, blog post, or library doc) they want adapted to this project. The agent reads, synthesizes, and confirms.
• resource-link — the user has a GitHub issue, a spec file, a notes repo, or any other concrete artifact describing what to try. The agent reads, summarizes through the three-question lens, and confirms.
• free-text — the user has a verbal/written idea and will describe it directly. The agent reflects it back through the three shaping questions and confirms.

Use the canonical AskUserQuestion UI; only fall back to plain- text enumeration if it is genuinely unavailable in the current session.

Exception — pre-resolved entry point. When iterate-ml-experiment dispatches here after free-text handling at the sourcing-menu level has already resolved the branch (the user typed a URL, an issue link, or a concrete idea directly into the sourcing AskUserQuestion), the parent passes the resolved branch + content in. Skip this AskUserQuestion and go straight to the matching branch with the content already in hand — the user has effectively already answered it. The synthesis-confirmation gate at the end of the branch still fires; only the entry-point question is short-circuited.

The three shaping questions

Every Proposal returned from this skill — in every branch — must answer:

1. What are we trying to learn? (turns "try X" into a hypothesis)
2. Why now? (the specific reason this idea surfaced — quote the user, link the article, cite the issue / file)
3. What changes vs. the previous experiment? (which file in src/<pkg>/ is touched, in prose — not code)

Missing → ask the user. Don't fabricate. There is no fourth "how will we know it worked" question — acceptance criteria are out of scope for this skill.

The three branches

Branch A — article-link

The user picks article-link and provides a URL (paste, follow-up prompt, or implicit in the parent message).

1. Fetch with WebFetch (or WebSearch first if only a topic was given and the specific paper has to be located). Read the abstract and the section most relevant to the technique.
2. Map to the three shaping questions. What does the article propose? What concretely changes in src/<pkg>/ to adopt it? Quote the article verbatim for "why now?".
3. Surface transfer risks. If the article ran on a different modality, much larger dataset, or different target type, note where the technique might not port cleanly. The Proposal's Open gaps carries these explicitly.
4. Flag new dependencies as open gaps, not as silent additions to Method outline (Stop conditions, above).
5. Flag domain-specific assertions as [needs user confirmation] in Open gaps.
6. Confirm before returning — see § Confirm before returning.

Branch B — resource-link

The user picks resource-link and points at:

• A GitHub issue: run the resolution priority below, then gh issue view <N> --json title,body,labels,url (and pull the most recent ~5 comments via --json …,comments or gh api repos/<owner>/<repo>/issues/<N>/comments if the body is under-specified — the proposal often lives in the thread).
• A spec file / notes file: Read the file the user named; don't crawl neighbors.
• A reference repo: read README.md / SPEC.md / NOTES.md or whichever top-level proposal doc the user named. Don't crawl the whole tree — that hides the signal.

GitHub-issue resolution priority (never silently guess the repo):

1. Explicit URL in the user's message (https://github.com/<owner>/<repo>/issues/<N>) — wins unconditionally.
2. org/repo#N shorthand (probabl-ai/skore#42) — wins over current context.
3. Bare #N or "issue 42" with no qualifier — fall back to the current gh context (gh repo view --json nameWithOwner to confirm). If nothing, ask the user before fetching.

In all three resource sub-shapes:

1. Map to the three shaping questions. What does the resource want to learn? What's the motivation as it frames it? What concretely changes in src/<pkg>/?
2. Cite specifically. The Source field references the issue URL, the file path (and line numbers if useful), or the repo + file — not just the repo name.
3. Flag gaps. If the resource doesn't answer one of the three shaping questions, list it under Open gaps.
4. Confirm before returning — see below.

Branch C — free-text

The user picks free-text and types their idea directly.

1. Walk the three shaping questions in plain language. Quote the user when summarizing so the framing stays theirs.
2. Treat their words as the Source. The Proposal's Source field is the user quote (or a one-sentence paraphrase the user has approved).
3. Confirm before returning — even free-text proposals get the synthesis gate. The agent's restatement of the idea may miss the user's framing in subtle ways.

Confirm before returning

In every branch, before handing the Proposal back to iterate-ml-experiment, the agent emits a short plain-text synthesis to the user and waits for explicit approval:

"From , I understand you'd like to — concretely, change src/<pkg>/<file>.py to . Open gaps: . Does this capture what you want before I hand it to the planner?"

The user's answer determines what happens next:

• "Yes / confirm / go" → return the Proposal. The parent skill drafts journal/NN_*.md from it.
• "No / not quite / adjust X" → revise and re-confirm. Iterate the synthesis until the user is happy. Do not return a Proposal the user hasn't signed off on.

This gate is non-optional. It is the user-side analogue of the parent's design-note approval gate — it catches misunderstandings before a design note is drafted, when the cost of revision is cheapest.

What is returned

A short structured block, not a design note:

Proposal (from: user via <article-link | resource-link | free-text>):
  Question:        <one sentence>
  Motivation:      <quote / URL / file path + the why-now reason>
  Source:          <article URL with claim | gh issue URL | spec file:line | user quote>
  Method outline:  <prose; which file in src/<pkg>/ is touched>
  Open gaps:       <transfer risks, dep questions, domain assertions
                    needing user confirmation, anything the source
                    didn't answer>

iterate-ml-experiment consumes this and drafts journal/NN_short_name.md. No Success field — the skill deliberately does not author acceptance criteria; the user judges the result post-run.

Companion skills

• iterate-ml-experiment — the caller; owns the design notes.
• iterate-from-skore — the only sibling strategy; sources the next experiment by mining the previous skore report into the Backlog.
• data-science-python-stack — consulted when an article introduces a new dependency (Stop conditions, above).
• build-ml-pipeline / evaluate-ml-pipeline — owners of the files (pipeline.py, evaluate.py, …) that the Method outline will eventually touch.