A skill your agent uses when deciding whether a theoretical-computer-science result belongs at FOCS (IEEE Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science) — testing foundations-level significance…

MITAuto-check passed

Install Focs Topic Selection

skills CLI
$ npx skills add brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills --skill focs-topic-selection -a claude-code

Project install by default; add -g for ~/.claude/skills/.

GitHub CLI
$ gh skill install brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills focs-topic-selection --agent claude-code

Project scope by default; add --scope user for a personal install. Needs GitHub CLI 2.90.0 or later (public preview).

Manual copy
$ git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills.git skills-src && mkdir -p .claude/skills && cp -r skills-src/FOCS-Skills/skills/focs-topic-selection .claude/skills/focs-topic-selection && rm -rf skills-src

Use ~/.claude/skills/ instead of .claude/skills for a personal install. The folder must contain SKILL.md.

Claude Code skills documentation · loads skills from .claude/skills/

Facts

Skill name
focs-topic-selection
GitHub stars
1.2k
Token cost
~1.8k tokens
SKILL.md length
932 words
Files
1
Skills in repo
2,387
Repo updated
First seen
Licence
MIT

At a glance

A skill your agent uses when deciding whether a theoretical-computer-science result belongs at FOCS (IEEE Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science) — testing foundations-level significance…

  • Works in 3 steps: Consequence: name a problem outside your… → Obstacle: state what stood in the way —… → Durability: would the result still be…
  • Weighing the April deadline against sibling theory venues like STOC
  • SKILL.md covers The significance test a FOCS…, Routing across the theory…, Timing logic from the FOCS seat and The broaden-the-reach lane, plus 2 more sections
  • Instructions only: no scripts, shell commands, URLs or credentials in SKILL.md

What it does

Focs Topic Selection is an agent skill from brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills. Use when deciding whether a theoretical-computer-science result belongs at FOCS (IEEE Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science) — testing foundations-level significance, weighing the April deadline against sibling theory venues like STOC, SODA, CCC, ITCS, or CRYPTO, and applying the CFP's broaden-the-reach clause.

Its SKILL.md is about 1.8k tokens, which your agent loads only when the skill is triggered. It is a single SKILL.md file with no bundled scripts.

The repository describes itself as: Journal-specific Claude Code/Codex skill packs covering mainstream journals — AER, QJE, Nature, Cell, 管理世界, 经济研究 & 200+ more — your fast track to getting published. | 覆盖主流期刊的… The licence is MIT.

When your agent uses it

  • Weighing the April deadline against sibling theory venues like STOC
  • Applying the CFPs broaden-the-reach clause

Example prompts

  • “/focs-topic-selection”

Workflow steps

3 steps, taken from the first numbered list in SKILL.md.

  1. Consequence: name a problem outside your immediate subarea that becomes
  2. Obstacle: state what stood in the way — a known barrier, a stuck
  3. Durability: would the result still be cited if the constant factors were

What it can do on your machine

Read from SKILL.md and the folder at commit 932eb23. It shows what the files ask for, not the result of running them.

  • Tool permissions

    Pre-approves nothing: there is no allowed-tools line, so your agent's usual permission prompts apply.

    From allowed-tools in the SKILL.md frontmatter.

  • Runs code

    No scripts in the folder and no shell commands in SKILL.md.

    From the folder's file list and the shell code blocks in SKILL.md.

  • Network

    No URLs in SKILL.md.

    From URLs in SKILL.md, links to its own repository left out.

  • Credentials

    Names no API keys, tokens, secrets or passwords.

    From names ending in _API_KEY, _TOKEN, _SECRET, _KEY or _PASSWORD in SKILL.md.

Context cost

Focs Topic Selection loads about 1.8k tokens when it runs. Until then it costs about 85 tokens; SKILL.md has 932 words of instructions outside code blocks.

Always · name and description, kept in context so the agent knows when to use it
~85
When it runs · the whole SKILL.md, loaded when a task matches
~1.8k

Estimates: characters ÷ 4, the usual rule of thumb; real counts depend on the model's tokenizer. Scripts and assets cost tokens only if the agent reads them.

Safety

Auto-check passed

The automated check found no risky patterns in SKILL.md.

Automated static check — not a guarantee. Review scripts before installing. It scans the text of SKILL.md for risky patterns (piping downloads into a shell, reading credential files, hidden Unicode, destructive commands); files beside SKILL.md are not scanned.

SKILL.md

The full file from brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills at commit 932eb23, republished under its MIT licence (© brycewang-stanford). 932 words, ~1,827 tokens.

Download SKILL.mdSave it as .claude/skills/focs-topic-selection/SKILL.md (or your agent's skills folder).
name
focs-topic-selection
description
Use when deciding whether a theoretical-computer-science result belongs at FOCS (IEEE Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science) — testing foundations-level significance, weighing the April deadline against sibling theory venues like STOC, SODA, CCC, ITCS, or CRYPTO, and applying the CFP's broaden-the-reach clause.

FOCS Topic Selection

FOCS asks for "new and original research on theory of computation" and explicitly welcomes papers that broaden the reach of the theory of computing or raise important problems that can benefit from theoretical investigation (FOCS 2026 CFP, checked 2026-07-08 via focs.computer.org/2026/call-for-papers-2/). The selection question is therefore two-dimensional: is this a theorems paper whose significance survives a committee drawn from every corner of TCS, and is the April-anchored IEEE cycle the right launch window for it?

The significance test a FOCS PC applies

A foundations flagship rewards results that change what other theoreticians can prove, not results that only optimize inside one subcommunity's parameter chart. Before committing to the April deadline, answer three questions in writing:

  1. Consequence: name a problem outside your immediate subarea that becomes easier, or a belief that must be revised, if your theorem holds.
  2. Obstacle: state what stood in the way — a known barrier, a stuck parameter regime, a missing structural insight — and how your technique gets past it.
  3. Durability: would the result still be cited if the constant factors were worse? If the paper's value evaporates without its best constants, it is likely a specialized-venue paper.

A "yes" on two of three is competitive; a "yes" driven only by technical difficulty, with no consequence statement, is the classic strong-reject-with- respect outcome.

Routing across the theory ecosystem

Signal in your resultBetter homeWhy
General TCS interest, mature proofs, ready by April 1FOCSThe fall flagship; full-version submissions welcome
Same profile, but ready in autumnSTOC (ACM SIGACT)The spring flagship; the other beat of the same community
Algorithms with heavy implementation or fine-grained constantsSODA / ESACommittees calibrated for algorithmic depth over breadth
Complexity-internal progress (e.g., inside a known hierarchy)CCCSpecialist referees who value the regime you improved
Conceptual model or provocative definition, proofs still thinITCSExplicitly rewards vision over completeness
Cryptographic construction with security-proof machineryCRYPTO / EUROCRYPT / TCCIACR reviewing conventions fit the proof style
Quantum result addressed mainly to quantum insidersQIPTalk-driven venue; pair with an arXiv record
Learning-theoretic core with sample-complexity focusCOLT / ALTStatistical-learning referees
Geometry- or distributed-computing-native contributionSoCG / PODC / DISCCommunity-specific evaluation depth

FOCS and STOC differ in sponsor (IEEE Computer Society TCMF vs. ACM SIGACT), calendar seat, and program committee — not in scope or prestige. Never argue "FOCS because it is stronger than X"; argue from audience and timing.

Timing logic from the FOCS seat

The FOCS deadline (April 1 for the 2026 cycle) sits roughly five months after STOC's early-November deadline and about seven months before the conference itself. Consequences worth planning around:

  • A February STOC rejection leaves about eight weeks to strengthen a paper for FOCS — enough for new lemmas, not for a new main theorem.
  • A summer FOCS rejection lands close to STOC's autumn deadline, making the two venues a natural resubmission loop for borderline-flagship work.
  • The CFP applies SIGACT's prior/simultaneous-publication policy even though FOCS is an IEEE event: work published, or scheduled to be published, before the conference month elsewhere is ineligible, and simultaneous submission to another proceedings venue or journal is barred.
Show full SKILL.md (414 more words)Show less

The broaden-the-reach lane

The CFP sentence inviting papers that widen theory's reach is a real lane, not decoration: FOCS regularly accepts work importing TCS rigor into new territory (economic mechanisms, learning pipelines, quantum experiments, fairness, verification). To use the lane safely:

  • The imported problem must be formalized well enough that a theorem about the formalization says something about the original phenomenon — reviewers reject "we define X and prove trivia about X" imports quickly.
  • At least one proof should require an idea that specialists in the source domain do not already have; otherwise the paper reads as a survey with notation.
  • Cite the domain's own literature accurately; a cross-over paper that misstates the state of the neighboring field loses the committee's trust on the theory too.

Common misroutes seen from the FOCS seat

  • The constants paper. An improvement from 2.371 to 2.368 in a famous exponent can absolutely be FOCS material — but only when the write-up explains the structural reason the previous approach was stuck. Without that, SODA's referees will value the engineering more.
  • The kitchen-sink crypto paper. Ten related constructions with security proofs is an IACR paper; FOCS wants the one construction whose existence changes the map.
  • The premature model. A new complexity model with only easy separations belongs at ITCS this year and at FOCS in two years, once someone proves something hard in it — possibly you.
  • The disguised benchmark paper. If the strongest section is an evaluation, no theory framing will save it here; see focs-experiments for what computation can and cannot do in this venue.

Quick self-diagnosis

text
[Claimed contribution] <one sentence, no adjectives>
[Consequence outside subarea] <named problem or belief revised — or NONE>
[Barrier bypassed] <named obstacle — or NONE>
[Deletion test] remove best constants: still citable? yes/no
[Cycle fit] proofs complete by April 1? yes/no
[Verdict] FOCS / STOC (autumn) / specialized venue: ____

Two NONE answers or a "no" on proof completeness means route elsewhere or wait a beat. FOCS grants no rebuttal in which to repair a shaky significance case (see focs-review-process), so the routing decision must be honest before the formatting work begins. If the contribution is a new model or problem rather than a theorem, re-read the CFP's broaden-the-reach sentence and consider whether ITCS's explicitly conceptual charter serves the paper better — an important-problems paper at FOCS still needs nontrivial technical evidence that the problem is tractable and rich.

Finally, calibrate against the venue's own memory: the exemplars library in resources/exemplars/library.md maps recent Test of Time and Machtey Award citations to durability patterns (field-opener, technique transplant, barrier map, subfield founder). If your draft cannot honestly claim kinship with any pattern there, that is not disqualifying — but it predicts which committee question (focs-review-process) will decide your fate, and it should shape where the writing effort goes.

© brycewang-stanford, MIT. Rendered from Markdown: HTML in the file is shown as text, images as links, and headings moved down two levels. Raw file

Files

Just SKILL.md in FOCS-Skills/skills/focs-topic-selection of brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills.

Open the folder on GitHubat commit 932eb23

Compare with similar skills

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GCP Computesickn33/agentic-awesome-skills47k2 repos~2.6kAutomated safety check: PassMIT
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Questions about Focs Topic Selection

What does Focs Topic Selection do?

A skill your agent uses when deciding whether a theoretical-computer-science result belongs at FOCS (IEEE Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science) — testing foundations-level significance…. Focs Topic Selection is an agent skill from brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills. Use when deciding whether a theoretical-computer-science result belongs at FOCS (IEEE Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science) — testing foundations-level significance, weighing the April deadline against sibling theory venues like STOC, SODA, CCC, ITCS, or CRYPTO, and applying the CFP's broaden-the-reach clause.

When should I use Focs Topic Selection?

Focs Topic Selection fits situations like: weighing the April deadline against sibling theory venues like STOC; applying the CFPs broaden-the-reach clause.

How do I install Focs Topic Selection in Claude Code?

Run `npx skills add brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills --skill focs-topic-selection -a claude-code`. Or copy the skill folder (FOCS-Skills/skills/focs-topic-selection in brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills) into .claude/skills/focs-topic-selection in your project. Claude Code loads it when a task matches its description.

How do I install Focs Topic Selection in Codex?

Run `npx skills add brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills --skill focs-topic-selection -a codex`. Or copy the skill folder (FOCS-Skills/skills/focs-topic-selection in brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills) into .agents/skills/focs-topic-selection in your project. Codex loads it when a task matches its description.

Can I use Focs Topic Selection in Cursor, Gemini CLI or GitHub Copilot?

Cursor, Gemini CLI, GitHub Copilot and OpenCode also load SKILL.md folders. With the skills CLI, run `npx skills add brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills --skill focs-topic-selection -a cursor` (or -a gemini-cli, github-copilot or opencode for the others). To copy it by hand, put the folder in .cursor/skills/focs-topic-selection, .gemini/skills/focs-topic-selection, .github/skills/focs-topic-selection and .opencode/skills/focs-topic-selection in your project.

What does Focs Topic Selection need to run?

SKILL.md names no scripts, command-line tools or credentials: Focs Topic Selection is instructions for the agent only.

Does Focs Topic Selection access the network?

SKILL.md contains no URLs. Any network use would come from the scripts or tools the agent runs. This is read from the text; nothing was executed.

Is Focs Topic Selection safe to install?

Our automated static check of SKILL.md found no risky patterns, such as piping downloads into a shell, reading credential files or hidden Unicode. It is not a guarantee. Review the folder before installing.

What licence does Focs Topic Selection use?

Focs Topic Selection is published under the MIT licence (the repository's licence). It allows redistribution, so the full SKILL.md is shown on this page.

How many tokens does Focs Topic Selection use?

About 1.8k tokens (SKILL.md is roughly 7.3k characters). Agents keep only the skill's name and description in context until a task matches; then they load SKILL.md in full.

What are the alternatives to Focs Topic Selection?

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Who maintains Focs Topic Selection?

brycewang-stanford (a GitHub user) maintains it in brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills, which has 1,219 GitHub stars. The repository holds 2,387 skills in this directory. The repository was last updated on September 27, 2026.

Source: brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills on GitHub. Facts on this page come from the repository at the commit we read; the author's words are quoted as theirs.