What problem does it solve? Deciding whether a draft research idea is worth months of PhD effort is hard to do objectively. This Skill applies a structured evaluation framework to kill weak ideas early and sharpen promising ones before writing or implementation begins. ## Core Features & Use Cases - Five-Dimension Scoring: Scores the idea 1-10 on Higher, Faster, Stronger, Cheaper, and Broader axes with cited evidence from the user's stated contribution. - Fatal-Flaws Audit: Runs an early gate against ten canonical fatal flaws (no novelty, wrong venue, capability mismatch, and more) with severity tags and defense strategies; a CRITICAL flaw short-circuits to Reject and Pivot. - Lifecycle and Feasibility Matching: Maps the idea onto a six-category lifecycle matrix and checks it against the student's weekly hours, skill depth, compute, and data access. - Use Case: A PhD student drafts an idea for inference-time search in Text-to-SQL and asks whether to pursue it; the Skill scores each dimension, probes paradigm-shift potential, checks feasibility against their GPU budget, and returns Strong Accept, Accept with Revisions, or Reject and Pivot with the top three actions to take first. ## Quick Start Use the phd-idea-evaluator skill to score my research idea on retrieval-augmented schema linking and tell me whether it is worth pursuing given 20 hours per week and two GPUs.
