Challenge: Figure Legend Generator
Can your agent write a figure legend as well as the authors did?
The task
- Download the figure below.
- Give it to your agent and ask for a publication-ready legend.
- Compare to the original legend in the paper.
The figure
Karczewski et al. 2020, The mutational constraint spectrum quantified from variation in 141,456 humans. Nature. Paper · Fig 1.
Tips
- Start in Plan mode so the agent asks you what it needs before drafting.
- The PubMed MCP and Anthropic’s life-sciences skills can pull the paper’s methods for extra context.
- Share attempts in the workshop Slack channel.
Want to make it reusable? Build a skill.
If you find a prompt that works, package it as a skill so any agent can call it the same way next time. A skill is a folder with a SKILL.md that defines the trigger, inputs, outputs, and workflow.
- Anthropic Skills overview — what skills are and why they exist
- Claude Skills documentation — how to author and load skills in Claude Code
- anthropics/skills — reference repo with official skills (
pptx,pdf,docx, etc.) you can copy from - Skills cookbook — examples and patterns
A “figure-legend” skill would take an image (and optionally a methods blurb), call a vision model with a tuned prompt, and return a journal-style legend. Save it once, share it in Slack, every lab member benefits.
Impossible mode
For when you’ve nailed the gnomAD legend and want to break your agent.
~30 panels in one figure: IHC, western blots, bar charts, karyograms, micrographs, FISH. Mixed conditions, mixed genotypes, mixed timepoints. No agent writes this legend in one shot.