A skill your agent uses when deciding whether a project belongs at MICRO (IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Microarchitecture) or should route to ISCA, HPCA, ASPLOS, DAC/ICCAD, SC, or MLSys —…

MITAuto-check passed

Install Micro Topic Selection

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

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

GitHub CLI
$ gh skill install brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills micro-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/MICRO-Skills/skills/micro-topic-selection .claude/skills/micro-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
micro-topic-selection
GitHub stars
1.2k
Token cost
~1.8k tokens
SKILL.md length
801 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 project belongs at MICRO (IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Microarchitecture) or should route to ISCA, HPCA, ASPLOS, DAC/ICCAD, SC, or MLSys —…

  • Works in 3 steps: State the mechanism in one sentence… → Name the structure it modifies:… → Name the cost line. MICRO reviewers…
  • Deciding whether a project belongs at MICRO (IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Microarchitecture)
  • SKILL.md covers The mechanism-residency test, Routing table (deadlines…, What MICRO itself rewards and Quick self-interrogation, plus 3 more sections
  • Instructions only: no scripts, shell commands, URLs or credentials in SKILL.md

What it does

Micro Topic Selection is an agent skill from brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills. Use when deciding whether a project belongs at MICRO (IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Microarchitecture) or should route to ISCA, HPCA, ASPLOS, DAC/ICCAD, SC, or MLSys — testing whether the mechanism truly lives inside the machine, gauging the MICRO evidence bar, and weighing the main track against the new Industry Track.

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

  • Deciding whether a project belongs at MICRO (IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Microarchitecture)
  • Should route to ISCA
  • MLSys — testing whether the mechanism truly lives inside the machine
  • Gauging the MICRO evidence bar

Example prompts

  • “/micro-topic-selection”

Workflow steps

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

  1. State the mechanism in one sentence without naming any software component. If
  2. Name the structure it modifies: fetch/decode/rename stages, branch predictor
  3. Name the cost line. MICRO reviewers expect area (mm² or KB of storage), power,

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

Micro Topic Selection loads about 1.8k tokens when it runs. Until then it costs about 87 tokens; SKILL.md has 801 words of instructions outside code blocks.

Always · name and description, kept in context so the agent knows when to use it
~87
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). 801 words, ~1,782 tokens.

Download SKILL.mdSave it as .claude/skills/micro-topic-selection/SKILL.md (or your agent's skills folder).
name
micro-topic-selection
description
Use when deciding whether a project belongs at MICRO (IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Microarchitecture) or should route to ISCA, HPCA, ASPLOS, DAC/ICCAD, SC, or MLSys — testing whether the mechanism truly lives inside the machine, gauging the MICRO evidence bar, and weighing the main track against the new Industry Track.

MICRO Topic Selection

Decide venue before writing a single evaluation section. MICRO is the flagship symposium of the microarchitecture community specifically — the 2026 edition is the 59th, which places its lineage back to the 1968 microprogramming workshops. Reviewers here are calibrated to mechanisms measured in cycles, bytes of state, and milliwatts.

The mechanism-residency test

Ask where the proposed mechanism physically lives and what evidence proves it works:

  1. State the mechanism in one sentence without naming any software component. If you cannot — if the sentence needs "the compiler", "the OS", or "the runtime" as a load-bearing actor — the work is cross-stack and ASPLOS deserves a look first.
  2. Name the structure it modifies: fetch/decode/rename stages, branch predictor tables, cache arrays and replacement metadata, prefetch engines, TLBs, memory controller queues, on-chip network routers, accelerator datapaths, or the power-management unit. A nameable structure is a strong MICRO signal.
  3. Name the cost line. MICRO reviewers expect area (mm² or KB of storage), power, and latency overheads next to the speedup. If the contribution has no hardware cost to account for, ask why it needs to be hardware at all.

Routing table (deadlines verified 2026-07-08; recheck live pages)

Symptom of the projectBetter homeWhy
Mechanism spans ISA design, coherence protocols, or whole-system organizationISCA (2027: abstracts Nov 10, papers Nov 17, 2026; Atlanta, June 2027)Broadest architecture scope
Same community, but your evidence matures mid-summerHPCA (2027: papers July 24, 2026; Salt Lake City, March 2027)Nearest-cycle sibling
Compiler/OS/runtime co-designed with hardwareASPLOS (2027: April 15 or Sept 9, 2026 deadlines)Cross-layer is its charter
Circuit, EDA-flow, or physical-design contributionDAC / ICCADBelow the microarchitecture abstraction
Application-scale HPC performance studySCWorkload, not mechanism
ML training/serving systems without new hardware structuresMLSysSystems-for-ML community
Production silicon retrospective, deployment lessons, negative results at scaleMICRO 2026 Industry Track (inaugural)Tailored review for industry constraints

What MICRO itself rewards

The Test of Time record is a usable fit oracle. Recent awardees (SIGMICRO ToT pages, verified 2026-07-08): utility-based cache partitioning (MICRO 2006), 3D die-stacking microarchitecture, and the CACTI 6.0 NUCA modeling work (both honored in 2025). The pattern: a general mechanism or model that other groups can adopt, not a point-solution tuned to one workload. Accelerator papers have the same shape — DaDianNao (MICRO 2014) won by making the memory locality argument for ML accelerators, a structural insight, not a benchmark victory.

Strong MICRO shapes:

  • A predictor/replacement/prefetch policy with a storage budget under a few dozen KB and a mechanism explanation for why it captures the pattern.
  • A security mechanism at the speculation/cache boundary with a stated threat model.
  • A modeling tool or simulation methodology the community will reuse.
  • An accelerator whose novelty is a dataflow or memory-hierarchy decision, defended with ablations.

Weak MICRO shapes: pure software optimizations, ISA proposals with no implementation sketch, "we ran X on Y and report numbers" characterization with no mechanism, and circuits work with no architectural consequence.

Show full SKILL.md (314 more words)Show less

Quick self-interrogation

text
Q1  Mechanism sentence written without software actors?          yes / no
Q2  Modified hardware structure named?                            <structure>
Q3  Cost line estimable (KB, mm2, mW)?                             yes / no
Q4  Evidence plan reaches at least cycle-level simulation?         yes / no
Q5  Would the idea survive a 2x-better software baseline?          yes / no
Q6  Is the primary audience microarchitects, not systems builders? yes / no

Four or more "yes" answers → draft for MICRO. Q1 or Q6 failing → run the ASPLOS/ISCA comparison seriously before investing in the MICRO evaluation stack. Record the answers in the project README — when reviews later dispute the framing, the original fit reasoning is the fastest input to the resubmission routing decision.

Borderline cases, adjudicated

Recurring gray zones and how MICRO's own record resolves them:

  • Microarchitectural security (speculation leaks, cache side channels, fault-injection defenses): squarely in scope when the defense or attack is a hardware mechanism with a threat model and a cost line. If the contribution is the vulnerability disclosure or the software mitigation, the security venues (IEEE S&P, USENIX Security, CCS) are the primary audience and MICRO the secondary.
  • Processing-in-memory / near-data computing: MICRO-shaped when the paper commits to a concrete device organization and evaluates against a tuned conventional hierarchy; SC/HPDC-shaped when the story is application scaling.
  • Simulation methodology and modeling tools: yes — the venue's own Test of Time record honors CACTI 6.0, and McPAT is a MICRO paper. The bar is adoption potential: the tool must change what other groups can evaluate.
  • Compiler-assisted hardware (hints, ISA extensions consumed by new structures): MICRO if the hardware structure does the heavy lifting and the software change is a thin enabler; ASPLOS if the interesting decisions are split across the boundary.
  • GPU/accelerator scheduling in software: not MICRO, however hardware-adjacent the vocabulary — no new structure, no MICRO.

Cycle awareness

MICRO's submission deadline sits in early April (2026 cycle: abstracts March 31, papers April 7, both 11:59 PM EDT — not AoE), with the conference in the October/November slot (MICRO 2026: Athens, Greece, Oct 31 – Nov 4). If you are reading this after the April deadline, micro-workflow maps the fallback lattice: HPCA in July, ASPLOS in September, ISCA in November, MICRO again next April. Dates above are one cycle's snapshot — reopen microarch.org before committing a plan.

Output format

text
[Venue fit] MICRO main / MICRO industry track / re-route to <venue>
[Mechanism sentence] <one sentence, hardware actors only>
[Structure modified] <named pipeline/cache/predictor/accelerator structure>
[Cost line] <area, storage, power estimate or "cannot estimate — warning">
[Evidence plan] analytical / trace-driven / cycle-level sim / RTL / FPGA / silicon
[Nearest competing venue] <venue + one-line reason it loses>
[Next deadline to target] <venue, date, source URL to re-verify>

© 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 MICRO-Skills/skills/micro-topic-selection of brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills.

Open the folder on GitHubat commit 932eb23

Compare with similar skills

Micro Topic Selection next to the 5 skills that share the most tags, products or categories with it. Stars are the repository's; “used in” counts other GitHub owners with a copy.

Micro Topic Selection compared with similar skills
SkillStarsUsed inTokensAuto-checkLicenceRepo updated
Micro Topic Selection this skillbrycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills1.2k—~1.8kAutomated safety check: PassMIT
LobeHub Micro App Splitting Guidelobehub/lobehub83k—~9.3kAutomated safety check: PassCustom licence
TopicsZimoLiao/scholaraio576—~294Automated safety check: PassMIT
Topic Modelingbrycewang-stanford/Auto-Empirical-Research-Skills4.5k—~3.7kAutomated safety check: PassCustom licence
Bestblogs Topicginobefun/BestBlogs4k—~670Automated safety check: PassNone
Zsxq Topicitwanger/toBeBetterJavaer18k—~564Automated safety check: PassNone

Similar skills

  • Documents how LobeHub's standalone micro apps are hosted, built and routed differently on Cloud versus self-hosted Docker, so a change does not break one path while fixing the other.

    83k GitHub stars~9.3k tokensUpdated today
    DevOps & CloudAuto-check passed
  • Topics

    ZimoLiao/scholaraio

    A skill your agent uses when the user asks about research themes, topic distribution, BERTopic clustering, topic overview, topic papers, topic merges, or HTML topic visualizations.

    576 GitHub stars~294 tokensUpdated 13 days ago
    Auto-check passed
  • Topic Modeling

    brycewang-stanford/Auto-Empirical-Research-Skills

    Structural topic modeling: STM spec, topic count, coherence-exclusivity.

    4.5k GitHub stars~3.7k tokensUpdated 3 days ago
    AI & LLM EngineeringAuto-check passed
  • Bestblogs Topic

    ginobefun/BestBlogs

    A skill your agent uses when the user asks about a specific topic, subject area, or wants to explore curated topic pages on BestBlogs.

    4k GitHub stars~670 tokensUpdated 3 mo ago
    Auto-check passed
  • Zsxq Topic

    itwanger/toBeBetterJavaer

    知识星球主题管理:搜索主题、查看主题详情、发布帖子、编辑主题、发表评论、回复某条评论(楼中楼)、回答提问、删除主题;通过 api call 查看主题评论列表、设置精华、设置标签、查看自己提的问题与已回答记录。当用户需要查找内容、发帖、编辑主题、评论、回复评论、回答问题、删除主题、查看主题评论、查看自己的提问记录、或管理主题精华和标签时使用。

    18k GitHub stars~564 tokensUpdated today
    Auto-check passed
  • Pubmed Topic Recommend

    aipoch/medical-research-skills

    Generate ~5 actionable research topic recommendations by querying PubMed E-utilities; use when a user provides a research direction/constraints and needs evidence-backed topic ideas quickly.

    2k GitHub stars~1.9k tokensUpdated 21 days ago
    Research & ScienceAuto-check passed

More from brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills

All 2,387 skills in this repo
  • Aaag Data Analysis

    brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills

    A skill your agent uses when running and reporting the analysis for an Annals of the American Association of Geographers manuscript — spatial statistics and modeling, remote-sensing accuracy, or…

    1.2k GitHub stars~1.3k tokensUpdated 11 days ago
    Auto-check passed
  • Aaag Literature Positioning

    brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills

    A skill your agent uses when positioning an Annals of the American Association of Geographers manuscript in the literature — engaging geographic scholarship across the relevant area and the…

    1.2k GitHub stars~1.3k tokensUpdated 11 days ago
    Auto-check passed
  • Aaag Rebuttal

    brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills

    A skill your agent uses when responding to an Annals of the American Association of Geographers decision letter (major/minor revision) — building a point-by-point response to the subject editor and…

    1.2k GitHub stars~1.4k tokensUpdated 11 days ago
    Auto-check passed
  • Aaag Research Design

    brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills

    A skill your agent uses when defending the research design of an Annals of the American Association of Geographers manuscript — spatial/quantitative analysis and GIScience, remote-sensing and…

    1.2k GitHub stars~1.4k tokensUpdated 11 days ago
    Auto-check passed
  • Aaag Review Process

    brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills

    A skill your agent uses when you need to understand how the Annals of the American Association of Geographers evaluates a manuscript — double-anonymous review routed through a subject editor by…

    1.2k GitHub stars~1.3k tokensUpdated 11 days ago
    Auto-check passed
  • Aaag Submission

    brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills

    A skill your agent uses when running the final pre-submission preflight for the Annals of the American Association of Geographers via ScholarOne Manuscripts — area/article-type selection…

    1.2k GitHub stars~1.6k tokensUpdated 11 days ago
    Auto-check passed

Questions about Micro Topic Selection

What does Micro Topic Selection do?

A skill your agent uses when deciding whether a project belongs at MICRO (IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Microarchitecture) or should route to ISCA, HPCA, ASPLOS, DAC/ICCAD, SC, or MLSys —…. Micro Topic Selection is an agent skill from brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills. Use when deciding whether a project belongs at MICRO (IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Microarchitecture) or should route to ISCA, HPCA, ASPLOS, DAC/ICCAD, SC, or MLSys — testing whether the mechanism truly lives inside the machine, gauging the MICRO evidence bar, and weighing the main track against the new Industry Track.

When should I use Micro Topic Selection?

Micro Topic Selection fits situations like: deciding whether a project belongs at MICRO (IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Microarchitecture); should route to ISCA; MLSys — testing whether the mechanism truly lives inside the machine; gauging the MICRO evidence bar.

How do I install Micro Topic Selection in Claude Code?

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

How do I install Micro Topic Selection in Codex?

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

Can I use Micro 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 micro-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/micro-topic-selection, .gemini/skills/micro-topic-selection, .github/skills/micro-topic-selection and .opencode/skills/micro-topic-selection in your project.

What does Micro Topic Selection need to run?

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

Does Micro 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 Micro 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 Micro Topic Selection use?

Micro 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 Micro Topic Selection use?

About 1.8k tokens (SKILL.md is roughly 7.1k 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 Micro Topic Selection?

Skills that share tags, products or a category with Micro Topic Selection: LobeHub Micro App Splitting Guide (lobehub/lobehub, 83k stars), Topics (ZimoLiao/scholaraio, 576 stars), Topic Modeling (brycewang-stanford/Auto-Empirical-Research-Skills, 4.5k stars) and Bestblogs Topic (ginobefun/BestBlogs, 4k stars). The comparison table on this page puts their stars, adoption, token cost, safety result and licence side by side.

Who maintains Micro 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.