lgwrightlab / schematic-figure

# schematic-figure
A skill for AI agents that draws publication-quality schematic figures for scientific papers. It gives you vector graphics (SVG and PDF) and the code that draws them, so you can edit any part. The story behind it is in our blog post, Automating schematic figure making.
Each paper shows the published figure, Opus 5.5 without the skill, and Opus 5.5 with the skill. The first four papers were published after the model's training cutoff. The last is from our own lab, Wang et al. (2022). All five are CC BY.
**⚠️ The skill does not replace the person who designs the figure.** It gives a fast first draft and many design ideas. You still check the science and fine-tune the details.
 Figure credits 
Published figures are shown resized for display, under CC BY 4.0.
- Physics: Chaturvedi et al., Trion Hall effect in electron–hole double layers, Nature Physics (2026).
- Chemistry: Peng et al., Divergent ring opening and functionalization of N-alkyl aziridines via boryl radical fragmentation, Nature Chemistry (2026).
- Biology: Wang et al., Scaling biodiversity-stability relationships from populations to meta-communities across trophic levels, Nature Communications (2026).
- Materials: Liu et al., Ultrafast directional hot carrier transfer in bilayer perovskite heterojunctions, Nature Communications (2026).
- Optics: Wang et al., An optical neural network using less than 1 photon per multiplication, Nature Communications (2022).
## Install
Copy both skill folders into your skills folder (`patent-drawing` draws patent drawing sheets and uses the engine of `schematic-figure`):
 [code] 
You can also ask your agent to install it. In Codex, name the path of `SKILL.md` in your prompt. The skill needs Node.js 22 or later and a Chromium browser. Blender and RDKit are optional, for 3D renders and molecules.
## Use
Tips to use the skill in practice, from our own use:
- **Give it the full story.** A short request will work for well-known concepts. For a novel scientific concept, the skill needs a detailed technical description to work well. Example:
 > "Use the schematic-figure skill to design Fig. 1 for our paper [attach technical description]."
- **Show it a style to follow.** An example figure, from your earlier papers or one you admire, gives the skill a target for colours, line weights and level of detail. Example:
 > "Use the schematic-figure skill. Follow the colours and line weights of the attached figure from our last paper [attach example figure]. Draw our new device in the same style [attach technical description]."
- **Ask for several ideas at once.** We often run three agents in parallel on the same request. Each comes back with a different design, and we combine the best parts into one figure. Example:
 > "Use the schematic-figure skill. Make three different designs of this figure with three parallel agents for our paper [attach technical description] and combine them in a single sheet to show me."
- **Steer it with a few words.** The sk