prior-artlisted

# Prior Art Hours get wasted building something arXiv already solved, with the failure modes already published. Read it first. ## Pre-flight (run before Phase 1) This skill is expensive: a real arXiv fetch plus roughly one isolated Agent call per paper (typically 10-20), plus scoring, clustering, and convergence. Do not pay that cost when there's no real prior art to find. **Step 1. Explicit invocation check.** If the user invoked this skill by name, or explicitly asked to "check arXiv", "check prior art", or "search for papers on this", **skip the rest of this section and go straight to Phase 1**. The user opted in. **Step 2. Self-judge (only if Step 1 did not match).** Ask yourself three questions. If the answer to any is no, ABORT. 1. **Is there a technical mechanism to research?** Naming a variable, wiring a CRUD form, or gluing two documented SDKs together has no prior-art question worth asking. Designing a caching strategy, a consensus/coordination scheme, a ranking or retrieval approach, an ML training or inference technique, a novel protocol, or anything where "the naive version breaks at scale" does. 2. **Is the user about to commit real effort to it?** A one-off script doesn't earn a literature search. A component that will anchor the architecture, or that's expensive to redo once built wrong, does. 3. **Did the user leave the approach open?** If they already named the specific algorithm/paper/library to use, or said "just implement i