git:20260909.921f3ca to git:20260914.563f6df

- This repository contains **Field Onboarding**, a reusable instruction set for guiding researchers into unfamiliar fields and decoding dense scientific literature.

- This file provides repository-level instructions for Codex and other coding or research agents. The behavioral specification itself lives in `field-onboarding/SKILL.md`.

- When a request involves onboarding a researcher into an unfamiliar field or decoding dense scientific material:

- 2. **Check applicability before starting.** The skill has an explicit "When not to use this skill" section. Narrow factual questions, specialist questions inside the user's own field, explicit requests for a short answer, and non-comprehension tasks such as translation, editing, search, or debugging are answered directly. Do not open the calibration intake in front of a question that one turn would have answered.

- 4. Read `field-onboarding/references/examples.md` only when an example is useful for resolving how to apply the rules.

- 6. When external research is needed and the agent has web/search access, prefer primary literature, official documentation, and authoritative reviews.

- 7. **Carry the target through.** The target collected at calibration routes the shape of every rung, not only which rung is expanded. Do not collect it and then ignore it.

- 8. **Check how settled the field is before teaching**, and say which of the three states applies. A field with no textbook is taught in grounded mode: central claims attributed, unstable vocabulary flagged, horizon stated. When you cannot form a reliable picture and cannot search, say so and hand over a search instead of teaching.

- 9. **State conventions.** Where competing sign, phase, unit or normalization conventions exist, name the one in use and the alternative.

- 10. **Apply the "Naming literature" rule without exception.** Every named paper, review, book, or package is either verified in this session with a checkable identifier, or explicitly labelled "from memory, unverified". Never attach a DOI or arXiv ID that was not actually retrieved. If the agent has no web/search capability, state that limitation once, mark everything unverified, and prefer executable search pointers over citations.

- The core workflow is intentionally tool-agnostic. Agents should map capabilities as follows:

- - **Web/search available:** verify recent papers, methods, software, datasets, and frontier claims before presenting them as current.

- - **File access available:** read supplied papers or excerpts directly and distinguish source claims from background, inference, and critique.

- - **No external tools:** perform conceptual onboarding from the provided context, flag anything that would require verification, and give search pointers (venue, group, query) instead of citations that cannot be checked.

- - **Interactive agent:** use one rung per turn by default and checkpoint before advancing.

- - **Batch/non-interactive agent:** if interaction is unavailable, provide a compact calibration assumption, then a clearly sectioned multi-rung answer while labeling those assumptions. This is not licence to run the ladder on a request that did not warrant it; the applicability check still applies first.

- - Keep the canonical reusable instructions in `field-onboarding/SKILL.md`.

- - Keep examples in `field-onboarding/references/examples.md`; do not bloat the entrypoint with long demonstrations.

- - Do not add vendor-specific behavior to the core workflow unless it is isolated and optional.

- - Keep the `description` under 1024 characters, and keep both the positive triggers and the "Do not use for ..." clause in it. Trigger scope is set in the frontmatter; the body cannot recover a trigger the description lost.

- - Any change that widens what the skill fires on must add a matching negative case to `references/examples.md`.

- After modifying the skill, validate/package it with the Skill tooling available in the environment. A valid distributable archive should contain one skill with `SKILL.md` at its skill root.