Research engineering

Use this skill when answering a question requires exploring alternatives, analyzing data or artifacts, or iterating on experiments before choosing an implementation. Work can start before any run is launched. Background research alone follows experiment records.

Read the research engineering guide for the record, branch, and promotion workflow. Read the current marin-logbooks guidelines before creating or updating its branches; research branches inherit Marin's root instructions rather than the logbooks index branch's instructions.

Coordinate the work

• Start from the decision, baseline, constraints, and useful stopping condition. Search prior work through use-echo and inspect the current checkout.
• Use a task issue in marin-community/marin-logbooks as the public entry point. Reuse an existing issue; when the task authorizes a new public research program, use file-issue with target repository marin-community/marin-logbooks to create its coordinating issue. An existing Marin issue can link to it. Do not publish private work without authorization.
• Work on a Marin-derived branch in logbooks. Preserve the notebook and supporting analysis alongside the actual experimental source changes.
• Record why each meaningful alternative was tried, the evidence it produced, what was learned, and the next decision. Commit and push supporting code and notebook entries before a milestone issue update or handoff.
• Keep the issue body current and its comments useful as a readable account of the important attempts, results, and changes of direction.
• Extract selected code into Marin contribution branches. Use manage-pr for their validation, publication, and feedback; keep the research branch intact. A useful negative result can finish a program without a code PR.

Delegate execution

Use the domain skill for each concrete operation, such as add-dataset, write-pipeline, launch-rl, add-pallas-kernel, or profile-training. use-iris owns job operations and query-finelog owns telemetry queries. This coordinating workflow does not authorize compute launches or recovery actions beyond the task's scope. Record meaningful restarts under their actual execution identities.

Babysit launched runs and PRs through a heartbeat: a scheduled follow-up in the host application that resumes monitoring after the active turn. Keep one monitor per task with its execution or PR identity, latest observation, owner, and exit condition. Report meaningful changes and required action; stay quiet while unchanged. Use use-iris for job completion checks and manage-pr for PR feedback and exit conditions.