Plan Submission

Turn "the deadline is in N weeks" into a dated, phase-aware milestone plan. Works backwards from the paper deadline (or forwards through rebuttal and camera-ready if the deadline already passed), anchored to a

venues/conferences/<venue>-<year>.yml

profile. Companion skills:

parse-cfp

(creates the profile),

preflight-check

(the T-3d desk-reject lint),

write-rebuttal

prepare-camera-ready

When to use

"Plan my SIGSPATIAL submission" / "what do I need to do before the deadline?"
"How many days until the NeurIPS deadline?" (AoE confusion included)
"When do I have to register the abstract?" / "when does the rebuttal start?"
The user just picked a venue (via
```
select-venue
```
) and asks "what now?"

Inputs

A venue + year (and ideally a track). The profile must exist at
```
venues/conferences/<venue>-<year>.yml
```
; if it does not, run
```
parse-cfp
```
first — never plan from remembered dates.
Today's date, and any user-specific constraints (vacations, co-author availability, experiments still running).
```
CONTACT_EMAIL
```
env var if the live re-verification fetch is used.

Process

Resolve the venue profile. Locate
```
venues/conferences/<venue>-<year>.yml
```
. Missing or from a previous cycle → route through
```
parse-cfp
```
to create/refresh it before planning. Check the profile's
```
verified:
```
block — if
```
confidence
```
is not
```
verified-live
```
or
```
verified.date
```
is old, treat every date as suspect.
Re-verify the critical dates against the live CFP. Mandatory before the user relies on the plan. Run:
```
python3 scripts/fetch_page.py "<cfp_url from the profile>"
```
Confirm the abstract deadline, paper deadline, and timezone on the live page (deadlines slip mid-cycle — extensions are common, but so are silent corrections). On mismatch, update the profile first. If the page is JS-rendered or down, say so and mark the plan "dates unverified".
Build the timeline. Run:
```
python3 scripts/build_timeline.py venues/conferences/<venue>-<year>.yml \
    --track "<track>" --today YYYY-MM-DD
```
The script is offline and deterministic: it detects the current phase (pre-submission / under-review / camera-ready), computes days remaining for every profile deadline, and emits dated milestones with standard backwards offsets (T-21d dual-submission audit and reciprocal-reviewing check, T-14d system accounts, T-10d author-list freeze, abstract registration at its real date, T-5d supplementary, T-3d preflight, T-2d draft upload, T-1d final upload).
```
--camera-ready YYYY-MM-DD
```
supplies a deadline the profile lists as null.
```
--format json
```
for machine use.
Customize the milestones using references/milestone-playbook.md: what each milestone actually requires, why the offset is what it is, supplementary/code size limits, reciprocal-reviewing mechanics, and the AoE math. Adjust offsets for the user's constraints (e.g. co-author on leave at T-10d → freeze the author list earlier). Never move a HARD deadline; only prep milestones are adjustable.
Add per-system steps from references/submission-systems.md for the profile's
```
review.submission_system
```
— account lead times (OpenReview profile moderation can take ~2 weeks), what the submission form demands, conflict-of-interest entry, and each system's signature gotcha (HotCRP's "ready for review" checkbox, PCS metadata lock, EasyChair co-author email typos, CMT COI lists).
Run the dual-submission audit interactively. Quote the profile's
```
review.dual_submission
```
policy verbatim, then ask the user to inventory every overlapping manuscript by ANY co-author that is under review or planned elsewhere (including workshop versions and arXiv plans). Flag conflicts against the quoted policy; when the policy is ambiguous, say so and point at the CFP — do not adjudicate.
Present the plan: phase, key-dates table with days remaining, milestone table (OVERDUE items first, called out explicitly), per-system steps, policy gates, and the re-verify warning. If the paper deadline has already passed, do NOT pretend otherwise — plan the next phase and say plainly which deadlines are gone.

Output

A dated submission plan in Markdown: current phase, key dates with days-remaining (timezone noted), backwards milestone schedule with status (in Nd / TODAY / OVERDUE / PASSED), submission-system checklist, policy gates (dual submission, LLM policy, reciprocal reviewing), and the closing notice: "Dates from
<profile>
(verified
<date>
). Re-verified against
<cfp_url>
on
<today>
. Deadlines change mid-cycle — check the CFP again before each milestone."

Guardrails

Never invent a date. A
```
null
```
in the profile stays unknown in the plan, with an instruction on where to find it — a guessed deadline is worse than none.
Always state the timezone next to every deadline. AoE is common, not universal (SIGSPATIAL uses Pacific Time); a wrong assumption costs a day.
Never submit, register, create accounts, or click anything in any submission system on the user's behalf. The plan tells the user what to do; the user does it.
Past deadlines are reported as passed, never silently dropped or rescheduled.
One page per fetch-script invocation; cache stays under
```
.cache/
```
(gitignored); never commit fetched CFP text.

Bundled files

references/milestone-playbook.md — what every milestone requires, default offsets and their rationale, supplementary/code limits, reciprocal reviewing, dual-submission audit, AoE math.
references/submission-systems.md — per-system walkthroughs: OpenReview, CMT, EasyChair, HotCRP, PCS.
```
scripts/build_timeline.py
```
— deterministic phase-aware timeline builder (run it; do not compute date arithmetic by hand).
```
scripts/fetch_page.py
```
— polite single-page fetcher for live CFP re-verification (vendored from
```
parse-cfp
```
so this skill is self-contained).
```
scripts/venue_profile.py
```
— shared profile loader (YAML-subset parser + family merge), vendored for self-containment.

plan-submission

NPX Install

Tags

SKILL.md Content