positioning-engine

positioning-engine is a skill for Claude Code from TobiasBlask/open-paper-machine. It costs 59 tokens per session (2,386 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A paper-positioning workflow that compares a research paper with its closest existing work and builds a structured explanation of what is different.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to identify similar papers, create a differentiation matrix, and draft positioning language for the introduction and discussion.
Why use it?
It helps answer the reviewer's question of why the paper is novel and makes the contribution and research gap easier to defend.

Skill for Claude Code

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

Part of the open-academic-paper-machine plugin — 33 skills, 21 commands, 4 agents shipped together

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.

agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/tobiasblask/open-paper-machine/positioning-engine
Any agent
npx skills add TobiasBlask/open-paper-machine --skill positioning-engine
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/TobiasBlask/open-paper-machine

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install open-academic-paper-machine, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 33 skills, 21 commands, 4 agents.

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 positioning-engine

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/tobiasblask/open-paper-machine/positioning-engine.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/tobiasblask/open-paper-machine/positioning-engine)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/tobiasblask/open-paper-machine/positioning-engine"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/tobiasblask/open-paper-machine/positioning-engine.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 59 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,386 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
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 $0.00059 $0.02386
Opus 5 $0.00030 $0.01193
Sonnet 5 $0.00012 $0.00477
Haiku 4.5 $0.00006 $0.00239

Measured 6d ago against content hash 559ee8f31d69, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-05, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

positioning-engine 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 6d 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.

skills/positioning-engine/SKILL.md · 287 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 287 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Orchestration Log: When this skill is activated, append a log entry to outputs/orchestration_log.md:

### Skill Activation: Positioning Engine
**Timestamp:** [current date/time]
**Actor:** AI Agent (positioning-engine)
**Input:** Paper draft + [N] comparison papers identified
**Output:** Differentiation matrix with [N] dimensions, positioning_analysis.md saved

Positioning Engine

Core Principle

"How is your paper different from X?" is the question every reviewer asks. This engine produces a systematic answer. It identifies the 5-10 most similar existing papers, builds a structured differentiation matrix, and generates a positioning statement that makes the unique contribution explicit and defensible.

The output directly strengthens the Introduction (gap + contribution paragraphs) and the Discussion (theoretical implications).

When to Activate

  • User says "position my paper", "how is this different from X?", "differentiation"
  • User says "compare to related work", "positioning analysis", "unique contribution"
  • During Phase 2 (Framing) to sharpen the gap and contribution
  • When a reviewer challenges the novelty or contribution
  • User runs /analyze-positioning

Prerequisites

  • draft.md or paper.tex exists (to understand the paper's claims)
  • references.bib and/or literature_base.csv exist (comparison candidates)
  • Research questions and contribution are at least tentatively defined

Step 1: IDENTIFY Closest Competitors

Finding the Most Similar Papers

Sources for comparison papers:

  1. From the paper itself: Papers cited in the Introduction and Related Work that address the same or very similar research questions
  2. From literature_base.csv: Papers with the highest topical overlap
  3. From snowballing: Forward citations of the paper's key references that appeared after those references were published
  4. Direct search: Search for papers with very similar titles or identical keywords

Read the full file on GitHub · 287 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. 6d ago First seen · 287 lines · 59 tokens per session scan A 559ee8f31d69

Subscribe to this mod's changes

positioning-engine is a skill published in the GitHub repository TobiasBlask/open-paper-machine (18 stars, last pushed 4mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 59 tokens to every session and 2,386 once invoked, about $0.0003 per session on Opus 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 2026-08-30.

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