China Patent Full-Lifecycle Assistant

The Specific Problem It Solves

Patent work involves a series of specialized and repetitive tasks: from drafting and novelty searching for technical disclosure documents, to rapidly understanding published patents, conducting multi-faceted reviews, responding to office actions, and tracking policy changes from the China National Intellectual Property Administration (CNIPA). Each step has its own methodology, formatting requirements, and document templates, but stitching them together requires significant manual effort in switching contexts and organizing information.

The China Patent Full-Lifecycle Assistant aims to digitize and systematize this workflow. It does not replace expert judgment but rather encapsulates expert experience into six operational modes and an automated pipeline. Its goal is to ensure the correct templates, scripts, and checklists are invoked at each stage, minimizing formatting errors and procedural oversights.

How the Skill Works: Core Modes and Key Steps

The skill is menu-driven and will force-display a mode selection upon first activation. Its core capabilities are realized through these modes:

• A · Disclosure Drafting: Starts from the technical concept (挖点), performs an automated novelty search, and generates a compliant initial draft. It auto-detects the patent type (invention / utility model / design) based on input materials and calls workflow scripts under references/disclosure-workflow.md.
• C · Patent Interpretation: Given a patent number or PDF, it produces a plain-language summary, a glossary of terms, and can attempt to build a knowledge map. It executes instructions in references/patent-reading.md and strongly recommends integration with note-taking tools like Obsidian.
• D · Multi-Agent Review: This is a key differentiating capability. Upon receiving a .docx application file, it launches over 13 parallel review agents to perform hard checks from various dimensions (e.g., claim clarity, novelty argumentation, formal compliance), ultimately generating an annotated, revised copy. This process mandates the use of built-in scripts, prohibits sub-agents from asking user questions, and must pass structural and paragraph-count validations.
• E · Office Action Response: Handles office actions (OA). Through case de-identification and storage (via templates/oa-case-template.md) and vector search for similar precedents, it assists in drafting a response. This mode is disabled by default and requires explicit triggering. Drafts must undergo human review before submission.
• F · Policy Radar: Sniffs out the latest CNIPA policies or examination trends and provides an informational list with URLs. This mode is also disabled by default and must be triggered explicitly; the generated list is for reference only and cannot directly modify the skill's own configuration.

Key Execution Principle: The skill follows a "thin routing" design. SKILL.md handles mode dispatch only; specific instructions reside in the references/ and templates/ directories. In environments like Windows, information output to stderr does not necessarily indicate failure; success is determined by the exit code and specific prefixes like EPUB_HITS_JSON: or REVIEW:. All file paths must be absolute.

Application Boundaries and Considerations

• Explicit Triggers and Human Review Gates: Operations involving final deliverables (OA drafts, E) or affecting skill configuration (policy lists, F) must be triggered by explicit user instructions and their output requires human review. The skill will not enter these modes automatically.
• File Format Dependencies: Mode D strictly requires a .docx file as input; Mode C supports public numbers, PDFs, etc. The skill validates input formats.
• Environment Compatibility: On Windows PowerShell, scripts may flag stderr streams as NativeCommandError, which does not affect script execution and should not be a reason to reinstall or downgrade the skill.
• Not an Omnipotent Tool: The skill is an auxiliary tool designed to structure and accelerate known processes. Final legal judgment and the distillation of the core innovative aspects of a technical solution still depend on the user's (inventor, agent, or examiner) professional expertise and decision-making. It does not generate entirely new technical solutions nor replace formal communication with the CNIPA.