Creator — meta-skill that builds experiment-orchestration skills

You are generating a skill that lives inside another project. The output is a working clone of paper-to-experiment adapted to that project's simulation framework.

Hard rules

1. Inspect first, ask second. Read the user's project root before any question. Files >> their description.
2. Don't invent fields. If a question's answer can't be inferred from the codebase, surface it; don't guess.
3. Skill output is text-only. No GPU, no simulations, no --apply to user files outside .claude/skills/<generated>/.
4. Generated skill must validate. Before handing off, dry-run the schema against one of the user's existing configs.
5. Single source of class registry. Generated skill must point at one runtime registry (e.g. tools/registry.py), never at scattered references.
6. AI only produces config; never executes. This contract is non-negotiable in every generated skill.

Process

1. Inspect repo  →  2. Interview (17 Q) →  3. Fill profile
                                              ↓
       6. Hand off  ←  5. Self-test  ←  4. Generate skill

Step 1 — Inspect repo

Read in order:

• pyproject.toml / package.json / Cargo.toml (language + deps)
• The user's main entry script (whatever runs a simulation)
• One existing config file (the kind of artifact the new skill will produce)
• docs/ for any README / architecture notes

Catalog: language, config format (JSON/YAML/TOML/Python), entry-script signature, output dir convention, existing analyzer/plotter classes.

Step 2 — Interview

Open templates/interview.md, ask the 17 questions in order. One question per turn. Multiple-choice when possible. Skip questions whose answers you already inferred — and say so ("from inspecting <file>, I'll assume X; correct?").

Step 3 — Fill profile

Save user answers + inspections to docs/specs/<TS>-<framework-name>-profile.md using templates/framework_profile.md as scaffold. This file is the input contract for skill generation.

Step 4 — Generate skill

For each {{X}} placeholder in templates/skill_scaffold/, substitute from the framework profile filled in Step 3.

Identity / structure (from §A):

Schema / validation (from §C):

Resource budgets (from §D):

Defaults (from §A.7 + C):

Write the generated files to <user_project>/.claude/skills/paper-to-experiment-<framework>/. Never overwrite an existing skill of the same name without explicit confirmation.

Self-check before handoff: grep the generated files for any remaining {{...}} tokens. If any survive, you missed a substitution — go back to Step 3 and add the missing profile field.

Step 5 — Self-test

Run validate_config.py --strict (the generated one) against one of the user's existing approved configs. Must exit 0. If it fails, fix the schema generation rule, regenerate, retry. Log failures into the profile §F (lessons captured for future iterations).

Step 6 — Hand off

Tell the user: where the skill is, what registry entries to add, the smoke-test command, and the contract file (SKILL.md) they'll iterate on.

Anti-patterns

Files

.claude/skills/creator/
├── SKILL.md                   # this file
├── templates/
│   ├── interview.md           # 17 questions (framework profile)
│   ├── framework_profile.md   # filled by creator + user
│   └── skill_scaffold/        # placeholder skill, copied + substituted
│       ├── SKILL.md.tmpl
│       ├── design.md.tmpl
│       ├── schema.json.tmpl
│       ├── registry.md.tmpl
│       └── validator.py.tmpl
└── references/
    ├── distillation.md        # what's framework-agnostic vs specific
    └── md_test1/              # this project as exemplar

End of skill.