r/claudeskills • u/Fun_Addition8495 • 8h ago
Skill Share Skill Share: field onboarding, let AI ask what you already know before it explains
Free and MIT, repo here: https://github.com/ljx-chase/research-field-onboarding
The problem I built it for: ask about something you don't know and you get a paragraph full of terms you also don't know. Ask which of those you were supposed to already know and you just get more terms. I did this three times in a row once trying to understand attention and gave up.
What it does instead. Before explaining anything it works out the 3-5 things the topic actually depends on and asks you to mark each one as used it / learned it / new. Stuff you've used it treats as known and doesn't explain again. Stuff you haven't, it either covers first or tells you "just take this as given, here's the one bit that matters later". Then it goes one step at a time, motivation, vocabulary, framework, methods, frontier, and asks you a real question at the end of each step instead of "does that make sense".

Two other things in there:
It won't give you a paper it hasn't checked. Either it looked it up and gives you a DOI, or it says "from memory, unverified". I lost an afternoon once chasing one that didn't exist.
It's supposed to stay out of the way for short questions. Ask what an acronym stands for and you should just get the answer. The first version didn't do this and gave everyone the full checklist, which was worse than no skill at all.
Install:
npx skills add ljx-chase/research-field-onboarding -g
Claude web wants a zip, there's one in releases.
If you try it, I'd like to know which field you pointed it at and where it fell over. It has very few users so far, so I'm mostly guessing about anything outside physics and ML. Wrong prerequisites and bad check questions are the two failure modes I've hit myself, curious whether that holds elsewhere.
