Plan submission

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

1. 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.

2. 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".

3. 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.

4. 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.

5. 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).

6. 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.

7. 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.