Gap Finder

Core Rule

Every claim in a draft is one of three things: cited, the author's own reasoning/data, or common knowledge for this audience. Flag everything else. For a genuine evidence gap — a claim the argument needs but the library cannot support — the honest output is a search direction (what to look for: keywords, likely venues/years, a citation-chain to follow), never a fabricated source that pretends the gap is closed. "The argument needs evidence on horizon-scaling of hallucinated tool calls and the library has none — search ACL 2024–2025 for 'tool-call error rate task horizon'" is the right output; an invented \cite{halluc2025} is the failure the whole kit forbids.

This is the breadth-first scan: what is missing across a whole draft, fast. It is deliberately distinct from /claim-check, which deep-verifies each cited claim against its source. Gap-finder finds the holes; claim-check checks the fillings.

When to Use

Invoke with /gap-finder when:

• A full draft (or several sections) exists and you want a fast map of every uncited / unsupported claim before investing in line-by-line verification.
• Early in revision — to triage where sourcing work is needed before /claim-check goes deep.
• After heavy drafting, to catch claims that slipped in without a cite ("I'll find one later" is how fabrications enter — surface them now).
• Planning a literature-search session — the gaps it emits become the queries for /lit-briefing and /literature-review.

Scope it to a draft or a set of sections: /gap-finder sections/. Unlike /claim-check (one section, deep), gap-finder is built to sweep wide — run it across the whole draft, then hand the worst sections to /claim-check.

Process

Phase 1: Load the Argument and the Library Roster

1. Read MANUSCRIPT_MAP.md — the Thesis, the Contribution, the Audience (decides what counts as common knowledge), and Key sources (what the library already establishes, and the "do NOT overclaim it as" column).
2. Scan references.bib — the roster of available cite keys, so a flagged claim can be matched to evidence the library may already hold but the draft failed to cite.
3. If a vault exists, read vault/index.md — the maintained roster of summarized sources and the standing Open gaps list (/lit-briefing keeps it). A gap already known to the vault should reuse its recorded search direction, not a fresh guess.
4. Read the target draft/sections — fast pass for coverage, not the deep per-source read /claim-check does. You are mapping claims to status, not verifying each verb against a PDF.

Phase 2: Scan and Classify Every Claim

Sweep the draft. For each substantive claim (a disputable assertion about the world, the literature, or the results — skip transitions and definitions), assign one status:

This is breadth-first: classify, do not yet verify. A CITED claim passing this scan is not "verified" — it has a cite that resolves; whether the source licenses it is /claim-check's job. Be strict on the escape hatches: "obvious to me" is not common-knowledge-for-this-audience (check MANUSCRIPT_MAP → Audience); an unframed assertion next to cited sentences reads as cited — flag the ambiguity.

Phase 3: Cross-Check the Library for Available Evidence

For each UNCITED/UNSUPPORTED claim, check whether the library already holds evidence the draft simply failed to cite:

• Match against references.bib keys and (if present) vault summaries. A claim that maps to an existing key is an easy fix — cite it (and then /claim-check it), not a true gap.
• Distinguish "evidence exists, just uncited" (UNCITED — fixable now from the library) from "no evidence in the library at all" (UNSUPPORTED — a genuine gap needing a real search).

This separation is the value of the skill: it tells the author which flags are five-minute citation fixes and which are go-find-a-paper research.

Phase 4: Emit Search Directions for True Gaps

For every genuine gap (UNSUPPORTED with nothing in the library), emit a search direction — never a fabricated source:

• Keywords / queries to run (e.g. "constrained decoding tool use", "self-consistency verification LLM agents", "tool-call error rate task horizon").
• Likely venues & years (e.g. NeurIPS / ICLR / ACL 2023–2025) where such evidence would live.
• Citation chaining from a paper already in the library ("backward-cite from tooluse2023 — it cites a multi-turn agent benchmark we lack"; or forward-cite to later work by an author already cited).
• Or, if no source is likely to exist, the honest alternative: rescope, hedge, or reframe as the author's own observation if Results support it.

These directions feed /lit-briefing and /literature-review. The loop stays honest: the author searches → /lit-ingests a real result → re-runs gap-finder; the skill never closes a gap with an invented \cite.

Phase 5: Report the Gap List and Tally

Produce the gap list (claim → status → fix or search-direction) and a tally. This skill reports; it does not edit — adding a citation that carries an argument is a Protected Claim (CLAUDE.md), and fabricating one is forbidden. Its only sourcing output is [CITE] flags and search directions.

Output Format

# Gap Finder — sections/ (breadth-first)

## Tally
- Substantive claims scanned: 41
- Cited: 22 · Author's-own: 6 · Common-knowledge: 5
- UNCITED (evidence likely in library): 4
- UNSUPPORTED (true gap, needs a search): 4

## Flagged claims
| # | Locator | Claim (quoted) | Status | Fix or search direction |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | intro ¶2 | "tool-call hallucination is a leading agent failure mode" | UNCITED | Maps to `halluc2022` in references.bib — cite it, then /claim-check |
| 2 | rel ¶1 | "prior gating work is all post-hoc" | UNCITED | Maps to `tooluse2023` — cite; verify it actually supports "all post-hoc" |
| 3 | intro ¶3 | "hallucinated tool-call rate scales with task horizon" | UNSUPPORTED | True gap. Search: "tool-call error rate task horizon", ACL/NeurIPS 2023–2025; or reframe as our own result if Results show it |
| 4 | disc ¶2 | "pre-execution gating generalizes across agent harnesses" | UNSUPPORTED | True gap (one harness tested). Search: "cross-harness agent evaluation"; or rescope to the tested harness |
| 5 | disc ¶4 | "this is the first pre-execution gate for agent tool calls" | UNSUPPORTED | Novelty claim, no comparison shown. Search the related-work space to confirm "first"; else soften to "to our knowledge" |
| 6 | method ¶1 | "ReAct is a standard agent scaffold" | COMMON-KNOWLEDGE | OK for an ACL/agents audience (confirm vs MANUSCRIPT_MAP → Audience) |

## Easy fixes vs true gaps
- **Easy (cite from library):** #1 (`halluc2022`), #2 (`tooluse2023`) — fixable now, then verify with /claim-check.
- **True gaps (need a real search):** #3, #4, #5 — search directions above; none invented.

## Search directions (hand to /lit-briefing → /literature-review)
- "tool-call error rate task horizon" — ACL/NeurIPS 2023–2025 (claim 3).
- "cross-harness / multi-environment agent evaluation" (claim 4).
- Backward-cite from `tooluse2023` for a multi-turn agent benchmark (claims 3–4).

## Gaps in the library (relative to the thesis)
- No source on horizon-scaling of hallucinated tool calls (claim 3) — sources/ has nothing.
- No cross-harness generalization evidence (claim 4) — one harness in the library.

End with the tally (cited / author's-own / common-knowledge / uncited / unsupported) and the count of true gaps. Never present a gap as closed by a source you cannot point to.

Pairs With

• /claim-check — the deep partner: gap-finder is breadth-first ("what's missing"), claim-check is depth-first ("does this cite license this verb?"). Run gap-finder across the draft, then /claim-check the sections it flags heaviest. The classification taxonomy is shared on purpose.
• /literature-review & /lit-briefing — the consumers of the search directions: a true gap here becomes a query there; the vault's Open-gaps list and gap-finder's output are the same list seen from the draft vs the library.
• fact-checker agent — dispatch it to chase a batch of UNCITED claims against the vault to confirm which map to existing keys, before the author hand-fixes them.
• block-fabrication.sh (PreToolUse) — if a gap tempts you to stub a .bib entry to make the flag disappear, this hook blocks it. That is the system working: emit a search direction, do not fabricate.

Common Rationalizations

Notes

• This skill never writes a citation. Its only sourcing output is [CITE] flags and search directions — honest, per the cardinal rule in CLAUDE.md.
• Classifying claims and judging audience-relative common knowledge is Reasoner-tier (CLAUDE.md → Model Selection); the .bib/vault roster lookup is mechanical.
• It is breadth-first by design — do not let it slide into per-source verification (that is /claim-check). If it gets slow and deep, you are running the wrong skill.
• A recurring gap pattern (the author keeps leaving novelty/generalization claims unsupported) is a rule — log under tasks/reviews/, applies_to: [citation, overclaim, scope], promote to ## Top Rules if it recurs (CLAUDE.md → Self-Improvement Loop).