phd-skills

Use when the user wants to find related work, survey a research area, identify literature gaps, or discover open-source implementations. Triggers on phrases like "find papers on", "related work", "literature review", "what papers exist", "open source implementation", or "papers with code".

Use when the user wants to design experiments, plan ablation studies, structure baselines, or create incremental evaluation strategies. Triggers on phrases like "design ablation", "plan experiment", "what experiments should I run", "baseline comparison", or "experiment matrix".

Use when the user wants to anticipate reviewer questions, select the strongest ablations to present, prepare rebuttals, or identify paper weaknesses before submission. Triggers on phrases like "reviewer questions", "anticipate reviewers", "rebuttal", "paper weaknesses", "defend the paper", or "strengthen the paper".

Use when the user wants to set up or troubleshoot a LaTeX environment, choose between biber and bibtex, install packages for a specific venue template, or configure compilation. Triggers on phrases like "setup latex", "biber vs bibtex", "latex compilation error", "install latex packages", "venue template", or "texlive setup".

Use when the user wants to prepare code for open-source release, create reproducible research artifacts, or structure a repository for publication. Triggers on phrases like "publish code", "open source release", "reproducibility", "research repository", "code release", or "prepare for publication".

Pre-flight checklist for long-running ML training jobs covering config diff, run naming, path verification, monitoring setup, and restart-cleanup. Use when the user asks to launch, kick off, start, restart, or kill a training run, or mentions launching a multi-hour or multi-day GPU job (python train, accelerate launch, torchrun, deepspeed, sbatch, tmux training).

Same-epoch comparison of training runs across wandb, neptune, tensorboard, or mlflow. Aligns runs at the student's current step (never current-vs-final-of-baseline) and separates proxy metrics from downstream targets. Use when the user asks to compare runs, check if a run is improving, track lag against a baseline, rank experiments, or evaluate run-vs-run performance.

Evidence-before-action diagnosis of failing ML experiments. Probes the system before guessing causes, process list, dmesg, GPU stats, log scrollback, checkpoint state, then states a hypothesis as a hypothesis and runs a smoke before claiming a root cause. Use when the user asks why a run is failing, diverging, OOMing, hanging, slow, producing weird metrics, has crashed, or asks to debug, diagnose, troubleshoot, or investigate a training issue.