ase-topic-selection

ase-topic-selection is a skill for Claude Code from brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills. It costs 79 tokens per session (1,466 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A venue-selection guide for research in automated software engineering. ASE is the IEEE/ACM conference focused on tools and techniques that automate tasks such as testing, analysis, repair, and code comprehension.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to decide whether ASE fits, compare it with venues such as ICSE, FSE, ISSTA, programming-languages conferences, or journals, and frame the project around its actual contribution.
Why use it?
It helps distinguish an automation contribution from a measurement study, theory result, or general machine-learning advance. Choosing the wrong venue can make a relevant project appear out of scope.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin.

Part of the ase-skills plugin — 12 skills shipped together

Good fit Use it to decide whether ASE fits, compare it with venues such as ICSE, FSE, ISSTA, programming-languages conferences, or journals, and frame the project around its actual contribution.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/brycewang-stanford/awesome-journal-skills/ase-topic-selection
About the project

Awesome Journal Skills is a collection of agent skill packs tailored to hundreds of academic journals across fields including economics, social science, medicine, science, and engineering. Researchers use the packs for tasks such as choosing topics, designing empirical strategies, preparing tables and figures, submitting papers, and responding to reviewers. The catalogue entries are the project's journal-specific skills and related plugins.

brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills · 1,289 stars · on GitHub · copaper.ai

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

Any agent
npx skills add brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills --skill ase-topic-selection
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install ase-skills, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 12 skills.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for ase-topic-selection

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/brycewang-stanford/awesome-journal-skills/ase-topic-selection/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/brycewang-stanford/awesome-journal-skills/ase-topic-selection)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/brycewang-stanford/awesome-journal-skills/ase-topic-selection"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/brycewang-stanford/awesome-journal-skills/ase-topic-selection/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

agentmods 80×15 button for ase-topic-selection

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/brycewang-stanford/awesome-journal-skills/ase-topic-selection"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/brycewang-stanford/awesome-journal-skills/ase-topic-selection.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 79 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,466 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00079 $0.01466
Opus 5.5 $0.00032 $0.00586
Sonnet 5.5 $0.00016 $0.00293
Haiku 4.5 $0.00008 $0.00147

Measured 1mo ago against content hash fc0ee20330cf, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-10-07, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

ase-topic-selection scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 1mo ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

ASE-Skills/skills/ase-topic-selection/SKILL.md · 94 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 94 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

ASE Topic Selection

Decide the venue before drafting. ASE — the IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering — is the home for research that automates software-engineering tasks: the analysis, design, implementation, testing, comprehension, and maintenance of software, and increasingly the two-way street of AI for SE and SE for AI. Its reviewers read for a technique or tool that automates something, evaluated on real subjects. A paper whose real center is a broad empirical observation, a testing-theory result, or a pure ML advance is respected and then rejected as off-center.

The routing question that matters most

The decisive ASE question is not "is this SE?" but "is the contribution an automation — a technique or tool that does an SE task a human or a weaker tool did before?" If the beating heart of the paper is a new automated mechanism (an analysis, a generator, a synthesizer, a repair technique, a learned model applied to an SE task), ASE is a natural home. If the heart is a finding, a theory, or a measurement study, a sibling fits better — even when the topic overlaps.

Sibling-venue routing table

Signal in your project Better home Why
Core is a technique/tool that automates an SE task, evaluated on real systems ASE Automated software engineering is its named center; dual IEEE/ACM, IEEE-Xplore+ACM-DL proceedings
Broad empirical or foundational SE contribution; the lesson is a finding, not a tool ESEC/FSE The general-SE flagship; PACMSE journal model, empirical breadth
Equally broad SE technique, but ICSE's cycle/stage fits and you want its reach ICSE The other general-SE flagship; different calendar and (IEEE-side) format
Depth in testing theory, program analysis foundations, or fault detection ISSTA Deeper testing/analysis expertise, round-based reviewing
The automated mechanism is a program-language/compiler advance PLDI / OOPSLA / POPL PL venues own the language-mechanism contribution
The contribution is a new model/architecture; the SE task is a benchmark an ML venue Model-as-contribution routes out of SE
Study too long or too nuanced for the page budget TSE / TOSEM / EMSE Journals with no page ceiling; some feed ASE's Journal-First track

Read the full file on GitHub · 94 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 1mo ago First seen · 94 lines · 79 tokens per session scan A fc0ee20330cf

Subscribe to this mod's changes

ase-topic-selection is a skill published in the GitHub repository brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills (1,289 stars, last pushed 26d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 79 tokens to every session and 1,466 once invoked, about $0.0003 per session on Opus 5.5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-09-15.

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