Skip to content

docs: optional AI-agent skill for SUMMA (community contribution, no code changes)#627

Open
ktwu01 wants to merge 1 commit into
CH-Earth:masterfrom
ktwu01:add-ai-agent-skill-pointer
Open

docs: optional AI-agent skill for SUMMA (community contribution, no code changes)#627
ktwu01 wants to merge 1 commit into
CH-Earth:masterfrom
ktwu01:add-ai-agent-skill-pointer

Conversation

@ktwu01

@ktwu01 ktwu01 commented Jun 14, 2026

Copy link
Copy Markdown

Hi SUMMA maintainers,

I'm Koutian Wu (ktwu@utexas.edu), a researcher working on AI-assisted scientific
computing workflows at UT Austin. I write agent "skills": structured
markdown documentation that lets an AI coding agent (e.g. a CLI coding agent or
AI IDE) install, build, configure, run, debug, and contribute to a model with
less hand-holding than a cold prompt. I'm doing this for a family of
Earth-system models; SUMMA is one of them, so I'll note up front that the
shape of this message is shared across that family. The SUMMA skill itself is
specific to SUMMA, and lives here:

https://github.com/earth-space-ai/summa-skill

This PR is a single small, optional pointer, concretely, adds one line under a 'Community resources' section in docs/index.md (the source for readme.md) linking the skill repo, noting
that an unofficial, community-maintained agent skill exists. It changes no model
code, no build system, and no scientific defaults.
If you'd rather not link it,
that's completely fine: close this and I'll keep maintaining the skill on my side.
The offer stands either way.

What a "skill" is

A directory (SKILL.md + reference/*.md): a routing hub the agent reads
first, then deep-dive docs it loads on demand. It encodes the procedural
knowledge usually picked up by working alongside an experienced developer.

Honest disclaimers (stated up front in the skill)

  • It's a helper for new users, not a gold-standard reference. Upstream
    remains the source of truth; where the skill and upstream disagree, upstream
    wins
    and I treat that as a bug.
  • It was assembled with AI assistance, and AI makes mistakes (wrong paths,
    drifted line numbers, stale fields, hallucinated flags). The skill says so and
    tells the agent to cross-check upstream before acting.
  • It is MIT-licensed on my side; SUMMA stays governed by its own upstream
    license, which the skill links to and does not relicense.

Why it might be worth a look

It helps onboarding. The most-exercised skill in this family so far is the Noah-MP one, so I'll give that as the data point and flag plainly that it's a sibling skill, not the SUMMA one: I used it to help an undergraduate go from zero to a scoped, runnable regional simulation plan (Texas, 12.5 km, NLDAS-2 forcing, on TACC) in about 3 DAYS, spin-up reasoning and a budget/smoke-test plan included. The SUMMA skill is built the same way, drawing on your community's own docs.

Credit where it's due

The skill draws on NCAR/summa, the CH-Earth/summa fork, and UW-Hydro/pysumma; it restructures that material for agent use. The acknowledgments section names the upstream maintainers and the
specific docs it draws on. Any errors or oversimplifications in the skill are
mine, not the upstream community's.

Happy to collaborate

I'd genuinely enjoy collaborating on AI-assisted workflows for SUMMA. If
there's an official place such a skill should live, conventions to follow, or
checks to enforce, I'm glad to adapt it.

Either way, thank you for maintaining SUMMA.

Koutian Wu
ktwu@utexas.edu
UT Austin
Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=s9w1k-cAAAAJ
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ktwu01/

Adds a single line under a 'Community resources' section in docs/index.md
(rendered as readme.md) linking an unofficial, community-maintained AI-agent
skill for onboarding new SUMMA users. No code, build, or default changes.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
@ktwu01 ktwu01 marked this pull request as ready for review June 14, 2026 23:38
Sign up for free to join this conversation on GitHub. Already have an account? Sign in to comment

Labels

None yet

Projects

None yet

Development

Successfully merging this pull request may close these issues.

1 participant