triz-skill

An agent skill that applies TRIZ to real problems — products, services, processes, organizations, markets, and technical systems — plus a deterministic MCP server so the agent can only cite principles and matrix cells it has looked up, never ones it recalled.

Two parts, usable separately:

| Part | Path | What it is | |---|---|---| | triz-innovation skill | skills/triz-innovation/ | SKILL.md, references, and the canonical JSON knowledge base | | triz MCP server | src/ | Read-only stdio MCP server over the same JSON |

Why

An LLM asked for "the TRIZ principles for this contradiction" will produce plausible principle numbers from memory. The matrix is a lookup table, not a reasoning step, so recall is the wrong mechanism for it — and a wrong cell silently poisons everything downstream. This repo makes the lookup deterministic and fail-closed: a blank or diagonal cell returns covered: false with a pointer to the canonical reference, never a guess.

The skill itself is method, not vocabulary: frame → diagnose → model → synthesize → substantiate, with the matrix used only where both sides of a contradiction credibly map to engineering parameters.

Install the skill

Copy or symlink skills/triz-innovation/ into wherever your agent loads skills from — e.g. .claude/skills/, .agents/skills/, .codex/skills/, or a $SKILLS_DIR your harness reads:

git clone https://github.com/sv/triz-skill.git
ln -s "$PWD/triz-skill/skills/triz-innovation" ~/.claude/skills/triz-innovation

Once the repo is listed on skills.sh the shorthand becomes npx skills add sv/triz-skill.

The skill works standalone. The MCP server is what removes recall from the loop.

Run the MCP server

Published package (preferred once released):

npx -y triz-mcp     # stdio server, no checkout needed

From a checkout:

pnpm install
pnpm start          # stdio server
pnpm test           # deterministic lookup regressions
pnpm typecheck

Register it (.mcp.json in this repo is a working example):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "triz": {
      "type": "stdio",
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["tsx", "/path/to/triz-skill/src/server.ts"],
      "env": { "TRIZ_DATA_DIR": "/path/to/triz-skill/skills/triz-innovation/data" }
    }
  }
}

TRIZ_DATA_DIR is only needed when the server runs outside this repo's layout; otherwise the data dir is resolved relative to the repo root and the server fails closed with a clear message if it is missing.

Tools

| Tool | Purpose | |---|---| | triz_parameter | Get one of the 39 engineering parameters; omit id to list all | | triz_principle | Get one of the 40 inventive principles; omit id to list all | | triz_matrix | Retrieve a canonical contradiction-matrix cell; blank cells fail closed | | triz_matrix_multi | Every (improving × worsening) cell for multi-parameter conflicts, aggregated by recommendation frequency | | triz_resolve | Retrieve a cell and expand its parameters and principles | | triz_tool_catalog | List the routed TRIZ tool catalog, optionally by stage | | triz_effects | Search the curated effects database by required function or category | | triz_route | Select candidate tools by stage and observed problem signals | | triz_evals | Return the neutral lookup and reasoning evaluation suites | | triz_graph | Optional: analyse a project's OTSM Network of Problems (see below) | | triz_purpose | Optional: inspect the invariant and purpose gate of one graph node |

Optional: your own network of problems

triz_graph and triz_purpose reason over a project contradiction graph — they ship with no data. The graph is an OTSM Network of Problems with a DIKWP purpose layer:

• nodes are open contradictions; edges are couples, blocks, or dissolves;
• the core conflict is the node with the most outgoing dissolves edges — resolving it removes the most others (the Theory-of-Constraints step);
• each node's purpose names the invariant it serves, and counts as secured only when a verified_by record exists on the node or on a linked registry entry. No verifier, no gate — it fails closed.

examples/problem-graph.json and examples/triz-registry.json show the expected shape:

TRIZ_GRAPH=examples/problem-graph.json \
TRIZ_REGISTRY=examples/triz-registry.json \
npx tsx scripts/graph-report.mjs report.md

Point TRIZ_GRAPH / TRIZ_REGISTRY at your own files, or place them at data/problem-graph.json and data/triz-registry.json.

Evaluations

skills/triz-innovation/data/ carries three suites:

• evals.json — hard lookup assertions (run by pnpm test) plus synthetic reasoning cases;
• published-case-evals.json — six problems reconstructed from CC BY MATRIZ publications. Solver prompts contain only pre-solution facts; reported diagnoses and outcomes stay in judge-only fields and are never returned by triz_evals.

Scoring does not require reproducing the published solution — a causally stronger, testable alternative earns full credit.

Running the suites (bring your own key)

The suites ship as data; nothing calls an LLM by default. scripts/run-evals.mjs runs them against any OpenAI-compatible endpoint and is fail-closed on a key — without TRIZ_EVAL_API_KEY (or OPENAI_API_KEY) it exits before any network call. CI exercises it in --dry-run mode only, which is offline and keyless. Results land in evals/results/ (gitignored) as JSON plus a markdown report:

pnpm evals -- --suite no-recall --limit 40        # matrix-recall citation benchmark
pnpm evals -- --suite reasoning                   # synthetic cross-domain cases, LLM judge
pnpm evals -- --suite published --variant solver  # blinded MATRIZ cases, structured variant
pnpm evals -- --dry-run --suite published         # plan a run: no key, no network

TRIZ_EVAL_BASE_URL and TRIZ_EVAL_MODEL select the endpoint and model (any OpenAI-compatible API). no-recall is the benchmark that justifies the server: a model asked for matrix cells from memory is scored against the canonical table, and fabricated citations are counted. With the server in the loop, the same citations are lookups — fabrication is zero by construction.

Data provenance and licensing

• The 39 parameters, 40 principles, and the core tool catalog are classical TRIZ vocabulary; the effects starter database (56 entries) is curated from textbook physics, chemistry, and geometry.

• matrix.json was imported from a machine-readable workbook. The underlying table is Altshuller's and widely republished. To regenerate the file from a source of your own choosing:

  npx tsx scripts/import-matrix.mjs <url|file.csv|file.json> [--format csv|json]

• Published case benchmarks are concise attributed paraphrases of CC BY publications; sources, authors, and pages are recorded per case in published-case-evals.json.

• The code in this repository is MIT licensed (LICENSE). That license covers the code and the original prose, not third-party data noted above.

Publishing and distribution

The full runbook — npm release flow, the MCP Registry PR, Smithery/Glama/PulseMCP, skill registries (skills.sh, anthropics/skills, OpenAI), and promotion — lives in docs/PUBLISHING.md.

Registries

MCP Registry. server.json holds the prepared entry (name io.github.sv/triz) for the official registry at registry.modelcontextprotocol.io. Listing goes through the official mcp-publisher CLI — not a PR: publish the npm package first (the registry verifies the mcpName field inside the published package.json), then mcp-publisher login github (device flow) and mcp-publisher publish. Full steps in docs/PUBLISHING.md.

npm. Publish to the public npm registry (npm publish) so npx -y triz-mcp works without a checkout. GitHub Packages also hosts npm packages (npm.pkg.github.com), but it requires authentication even to install public packages, so it suits private or org-internal distribution — not a public CLI.