Significance Agent Skill

Draft the Significance section of a research grant — the case that the problem matters and the field will change if the work succeeds.

Context cost
1.4k tokensestimated from the bundle, loaded when it triggers
Bundle
1 file · 5.8 kBtext throughout, nothing executable
Licence
not declarednone named by its author
Last change
—no release on file
Servers it uses
Noneruns standalone

What it does

Draft the Significance section of a research grant — the case that the problem matters and the field will change if the work succeeds. Use when the user is writing or revising Significance or Background & Significance (NIH Research Strategy), the importance/impact framing of an NSF Project Description, disease relevance for DoD/CDMRP, or asks how to make a compelling case for why their research matters or how to counter an "incremental" or "low impact" critique.

What this skill changes about the agent has not been set out here as a list. Its SKILL.md, shown below, says it in the author’s own words.

contentresearch

The skill itself

A skill is instructions the model reads, so you can see what you are getting: below is the start of its SKILL.md. The front matter loads with every session, the body loads when the skill triggers, and the whole file comes with the install.

SKILL.md5.8 kB · preview
--- name: grant-significance ---
6# Significance
7
8Significance argues that the problem is important, the current state of the field is inadequate, and the proposed work will improve scientific knowledge, technical capability, or clinical practice. It is an argument, not a literature review — every cited fact must be load-bearing.
9
10Read _agent/project-config.md and the current aims version first. Length is set by the grant type: within an NIH 12-page Research Strategy, Significance typically runs 1.5–3 pages; a 6-page R21 compresses it to ~1 page; NSF distributes the same content across the Project Description opening and Broader Impacts. Check the FOA and ask the user what allocation they want. Apply _agent/style-profile.md to every sentence of document text, and before delivering drafted or revised prose check it against the profile's *Directives* list item by item, counting any punctuation the profile constrains rather than estimating (shared convention 5).
11
12## Your ideas, not mine (shared convention 8)
13
14The significance case — why the problem matters, why the field is stuck, what changes if the work succeeds — is the applicant's own scientific judgment, and NIH will reject sections "substantially developed by AI" as not their original ideas ([NOT-OD-25-132](https://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/notice-files/NOT-OD-25-132.html), Sep 25 2025 receipt onward). Draw the argument, the stakes, and the field claims out of the researcher; then organize, tighten, and evidence-check what they supply. Do not invent significance the researcher has not asserted, and do not manufacture impact to answer an "incremental" worry — if the case is genuinely thin, say so and send them back to the science and the literature.
15
16## The argument structure
17
18Build in this order; each paragraph should advance the argument or be cut:
19
201. **The problem and its scale** — disease burden, scientific bottleneck, technological gap. Quantify (prevalence, cost, error rates). Neutral, cited facts.
212. **State of the field** — what is known, briefly; the strongest existing work acknowledged fairly. Reviewers in the field will know if prior work is misrepresented.
223. **The critical gap or barrier** — precisely what is unknown or impossible today, and *why it has persisted* (technical barrier, missing model, unexamined assumption). This sentence family is the core of the section.
234. **What this project changes** — how the expected outcomes fill the gap; the immediate field-level consequences and the downstream trajectory (new therapeutic targets, enabled measurements, revised framework).
245. **Rigor of the premise** (NIH) — the key prior data the project rests on, and their strength/limitations, stated candidly. Under the simplified review framework this feeds Factor 1 scoring.
This is a preview of SKILL.md. Download or install the skill to get the whole thing.
In the file
SKILL.md852 words
Files1
Licencenot declared
Why you can read it

Nothing in a skill executes. The client loads the text and the model follows it, so a skill can be audited the way a runbook is — by reading it.

What it costs in context

Skills are not billed by the call. They are paid for in context: every token the instructions occupy is a token your code, your diff and your conversation cannot use. Here is what this one takes and when it takes it.

≈130
always loaded
The name and description, so the model knows the skill exists and when to reach for it.
1,320
on trigger
The instruction body, read only when the skill fires.
0.73%
of a 200k window
Ten skills this size would take about 7% of the window before you open a file.
050k100k150k200k context window

1.4k tokens, estimated from the bundle at four bytes to the token, held for the rest of the session once it triggers. Middling. Fine to keep on in a project where you use it weekly, worth unloading in one where you never do.

Servers bill, skills cost

A server charges by the month. A skill charges once per session, in context, and then keeps charging it for as long as the session lives.

Before and after

The same question, put to the same model twice: once as it comes, and once with these instructions loaded.

No worked example has been published for this skill yet.

The procedure it runs

The procedure has not been set out here step by step. It is in the body of its SKILL.md: the start of it is shown above, and the whole file comes with the install.

Prose, not code

These steps are written for a model to follow, not executed by a runtime. It can still be told to skip one, and it will say so when it does.

Servers it uses

None. This skill calls no MCP servers at all.

Everything it needs is in the instructions, so it works in a project with nothing connected — the model reads the file and changes how it works with what it can already reach.

Its SKILL.md does not declare which tools it asks the agent for, so what it touches is whatever the instructions themselves ask for — read them before you install it.

What it asks for
Writes filesnot declared
Network accessnot declared

This SKILL.md carries no allowed-tools line, so neither is declared. A skill grants no permissions of its own — it can only ask for tools your client already has.

What it will not do

Every skill is narrow, and the useful ones say where they stop. These are the jobs this one is the wrong tool for.

What this skill is not for has not been published here. Nothing is implied by that: it is a section the author has not filled in.

What is in the bundle

1 file, 5.8 kB on disk. A bundle is text throughout: the instructions the model reads, plus the templates it fills in.

  • SKILL.md5.8 kB
What is not in it

No dependencies and nothing executable: a skill is text the agent reads, so the bundle is 1 file you can review in full before installing.

Install

Installing copies the bundle into your project. Nothing runs at install time — the files sit on disk until the model reads them.

# Significance · 1.4k tokens when loaded · macOS, Linux mkdir -p .claude/skills && t=$(mktemp -d) && curl -fsSL -o "$t/bundle.tar.gz" https://mcprush.com/api/skills/significance/bundle.tar.gz && tar -xzf "$t/bundle.tar.gz" -C "$t" && [ -d "$t/significance" ] && { [ ! -e .claude/skills/significance ] || { mv .claude/skills/significance "$t/.previous" && echo "Previous copy moved to $t/.previous"; }; } && mv "$t/significance" .claude/skills/ && echo "Installed .claude/skills/significance"
On Windows, or any OS with Node 20+
npx mcprush@latest skill add joshua-d-campbell/significance

Windows PowerShell says 'running scripts is disabled on this system'? Run Set-ExecutionPolicy -Scope CurrentUser RemoteSigned once, or type npx.cmd instead of npx (codex.cmd, gemini.cmd, grok.cmd likewise). PowerShell 7 needs neither. Writes to .claude/skills/significance/ in the current project. For every project instead, run mkdir -p ~/.claude/skills && t=$(mktemp -d) && curl -fsSL -o "$t/bundle.tar.gz" https://mcprush.com/api/skills/significance/bundle.tar.gz && tar -xzf "$t/bundle.tar.gz" -C "$t" && [ -d "$t/significance" ] && { [ ! -e ~/.claude/skills/significance ] || { mv ~/.claude/skills/significance "$t/.previous" && echo "Previous copy moved to $t/.previous"; }; } && mv "$t/significance" ~/.claude/skills/ && echo "Installed ~/.claude/skills/significance" (macOS, Linux) — or add --global to the npx line. The curl line replaces .claude/skills/significance/ only after the download succeeds, so files left there by another skill of the same name, or by an older release, do not mix in. A copy already there is moved aside, not deleted, and the line prints where. It appears as grant-significance in Gemini CLI, Codex, Copilot and Grok (its own name); Claude Code lists it by the folder name, significance.

Which clients pick it up on their own

A skill is a folder of text. Most of these read a skills folder and pick it up without being told; the rest take the same folder another way — an upload in the app, a parameter on an API call — and then choose it by its description just the same.

Claude Code.claude/skills/
Claude DesktopCustomize › Skills
ChatGPTSkills › Create › Upload
Cursor.cursor/skills/
VS Code.github/skills/
Codex CLI.agents/skills/
Gemini CLI.gemini/skills/
Grok Build.grok/skills/
Microsoft CopilotSkills › Upload a skill
PerplexityComputer › Skills › Upload a skill
DeepSeek Harness.dsh/skills/
Zed.agents/skills/
Devin Desktop.devin/skills/
Windsurf (legacy).windsurf/skills/
OpenAI Agents SDKInstructions or sandbox Skills
HTTP / APIa request parameter
This release
Versionnot versioned
Publishedno release date on file
PriceFree
Referencejoshua-d-campbell/significance

Versions

Its author publishes no version number, so there is nothing here to pin to: what you install is the folder as it stands today. Instructions change more often than APIs do — a skill can be rewritten entirely without anything it depends on moving.

Pinning

Nothing to pin to: this skill carries no version number of its own. What you install is what the folder holds on the day you install it.

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