micro-experiments
Use when designing or auditing the evaluation of a MICRO paper — choosing the right instrument on the ladder from analytical model to cycle-level simulator to RTL to silicon, tuning baselines the PC will respect, selecting workload suites, running ablations and sensitivity sweeps, and reporting geomeans with full overhead accounting.
Profile →npx skills add brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills --skill micro-experiments --agent claude-code
Same command for any agent — swap --agent for codex, cursor, copilot.
Weekly change comes from our own snapshots, not the repository page — it measures attention, not adoption.
# MICRO Experiments MICRO's evaluation culture is instrument-centric: the community knows exactly what each measurement tool can and cannot prove, and reviewers score the *match between claim and instrument* before they look at the numbers. ## The instrument ladder | Instrument | Proves | Cannot prove | Typical tools | |---|---|---|---| | Analytical / trace model | First-order potential, limit studies | Interaction effects, timing | custom, trace-driven models | | Cycle-level simulation | Relative performance of mechanisms | Absolute wall-clock, physical cost | gem5, ChampSim, Sniper, Ramulator/DRAMsim3 | | Power/area models on top of sim | Energy and area trends | Sign-off-quality numbers | McPAT, CACTI, Accelergy | | RTL + synthesis | Timing closure, real area/power at a node | Full-system performance | Verilog/Chisel + synthesis flow | | FPGA prototype | Functional correctness at scale, OS interaction | ASIC frequency/power | FireSim, custom boards | | Silicon measurement | Everything, for that one chip | Generality across designs | perf counters, power rails | Rule: **claim one rung below your strongest instrument.** Cycle-level simulation plus McPAT supports "reduces memory-st
- The instrument ladder
- Baseline construction — where most rejections start
- Workloads
- The ablation and sensitivity contract
- Simulation-length and validation sanity
- Overhead accounting checklist
- Output format
What does the micro-experiments skill do?
Use when designing or auditing the evaluation of a MICRO paper — choosing the right instrument on the ladder from analytical model to cycle-level simulator to RTL to silicon, tuning baselines the PC will respect, selecting workload suites, running ablations and sensitivity sweeps, and reporting geomeans with full overhead accounting.
How do I install it?
Run `npx skills add brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills --skill micro-experiments --agent claude-code` — it drops the skill into your project so the agent can pick it up. Swap the --agent value for codex, cursor or copilot if you use one of those.
Where does this skill come from?
From brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills, a repository with 909 stars. We read it straight from the repository tree rather than a submitted listing, so what you see here is what is actually published.
Is a popular skill a good skill?
Not necessarily. Stars measure attention, not adoption — a repository can trend for a week and be abandoned. That is why we show the weekly change from our own snapshots next to the total, instead of a single flattering number.