init: scaffold Seth-Workflow-April-2026

User-agnostic, shareable AI-assisted development workflow distilled from
26+ real projects. Includes 9 composable rules, 4 project templates,
pre-push secret scanning hook, 3 methodology guides, and customization docs.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.6 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>

workflows/paper-writing.md

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+# Human-AI Collaborative Research Workflow
+
+How papers and technical documents get written through structured conversation between a human and an AI assistant. This isn't a template -- it's a description of the conversational process that produces the best results.
+
+## Who's Involved
+
+Papers are co-authored through conversation. The human brings domain expertise, real-world constraints, and the problems worth solving. The AI brings breadth of knowledge, structured thinking, and the ability to rapidly explore implications. Both push back on each other's ideas.
+
+The process works with any human-AI pair, human-human pair, or even a solo author disciplined about arguing with their own ideas.
+
+## The Process
+
+### 1. Start With a Real Problem
+
+Every paper starts from something encountered during actual work -- development, testing, deployment, user feedback. Not "what should we write about" but "this thing doesn't work the way we assumed" or "there's a gap nobody addressed."
+
+The trigger is friction, not ambition. If you're looking for a paper topic, you don't have one yet. Wait until something breaks, surprises you, or refuses to fit the existing model.
+
+### 2. Bounce Ideas -- Don't Commit Early
+
+The first idea is usually wrong, or at least incomplete. The conversation should explore freely before converging:
+
+- Propose an approach
+- Poke holes in it
+- See what survives
+- The hole-poking often reveals the real insight
+
+**Key behavior:** Both participants should push back. If an idea sounds good but has a flaw, say so. If the flaw isn't fatal, say that too. The goal is truth, not agreement. An AI that agrees with everything produces shallow papers. A human who ignores AI pushback misses blind spots.
+
+### 3. Let the Conversation Cross Boundaries
+
+The best insights come from connecting ideas across papers. A finding about measurement limitations in one paper might directly invalidate an assumption in a different discussion.
+
+When a new idea contradicts or refines a previous paper, that's not a problem -- it's the point. The paper series is a living body of work where later papers can refute, extend, or reframe earlier ones. Intellectual honesty means being willing to say "Paper N was wrong about X, here's what we know now."
+
+### 4. Know When to Stop Exploring and Start Writing
+
+The transition from conversation to paper happens when:
+
+- A core insight has crystallized that wasn't obvious at the start
+- The explored-and-rejected alternatives are clear enough to document
+- The conversation is circling rather than advancing
+- Someone says "this is worth capturing"
+
+Don't force the transition. Some conversations produce a paper in 30 minutes. Some take hours. Some don't produce a paper at all -- and that's fine.
+
+### 5. Capture the Journey, Not Just the Destination
+
+The paper should include:
+
+- **The problem** -- what triggered the investigation
+- **What was explored** -- approaches that were considered, including dead ends
+- **Why each was rejected** -- specific reasons, not hand-waving
+- **The solution** -- what survived the exploration
+- **What it changes** -- how this relates to and updates prior work
+- **What to build and when** -- actionable phases with trigger conditions (if applicable)
+
+The dead ends matter. A reader who only sees the final architecture doesn't understand why alternatives were rejected. They'll propose the same rejected ideas again. Documenting the reasoning prevents that.
+
+### 6. Tie Back to the Series
+
+Every paper exists in context:
+- Which prior papers does this extend?
+- Which does it partially or fully refute?
+- Which assumptions from earlier papers does this validate or invalidate?
+
+## What Makes a Good Paper
+
+**Grounded in practice.** Every paper connects to a real system with real constraints. The constraints -- budgets, latency requirements, hardware limitations, real users -- are what make the architectural decisions interesting.
+
+**Honest about uncertainty.** Explicitly separate "what we know" (measured, tested, observed) from "what we're guessing" (estimated, theorized, assumed). Speculation labeled as speculation is useful. Speculation presented as fact is dangerous.
+
+**Actionable.** Papers include implementation phases, build triggers, or at minimum a clear statement of what changes. "This is interesting" isn't enough -- "this means we should build X when Y happens" is.
+
+**Self-correcting.** Later papers can and should update earlier ones. A paper that says "Paper 3 was wrong about X" is more valuable than one that ignores the contradiction.
+
+## Anti-Patterns
+
+**Writing to fill a gap.** Don't look at the paper list and think "we need a paper about X." Papers emerge from real problems, not from gaps in a table of contents.
+
+**Premature convergence.** Don't settle on the first reasonable idea. Push back, explore alternatives, find the flaws. If you haven't rejected at least one approach, you haven't explored enough.
+
+**Orphaned papers.** A paper that doesn't reference prior work or get referenced by later work is disconnected from the series.
+
+**Over-engineering the solution.** Some ideas are good but premature. Document them for when they're needed, but don't recommend building them now. "This solves a problem we don't have yet" is a valid conclusion.
+
+**Polishing away the exploration.** The conversation that led to the paper -- including wrong turns and dead ends -- is part of the value. Don't edit into a clean narrative that hides how the ideas developed.
+
+## Paper Numbering
+
+Sequential. No gaps. No sub-numbering. If a paper's findings are superseded, the superseding paper says so explicitly -- the old paper stays in the sequence as a record of the reasoning path.