Food-Proposal — Research & Funding Proposal Orchestrator

The proposal counterpart of food-pipeline. It does not research, write, or review itself — it routes the proposal to the specialist skills and enforces the target funding scheme's format, length limit, and assessment criteria at every gate. Original work; the orchestration mirrors food-pipeline.

Scheme first — the key difference from a paper

A proposal is written to a funding scheme's format, the way a manuscript is written to a journal's. Before anything else, resolve the target scheme (references/scheme-selection.md): ask the user which scheme, then load its spec from schemes/<id>.md + schemes/schemes.json (required headings in order, page/word limit, font, assessment criteria). Built-in: arc-discovery-eoi, arc-discovery-full, uom-major-minor-project (see schemes/INDEX.md). If the scheme isn't built in, don't guess — ask the user to upload the scheme's guideline / sample form and run scheme_extractor to capture its format into a new schemes/<id>.md + schemes.json entry. Every scheme carries a length limit — enforce it with scripts/proposal_wordcount.py.

Own subagents

• proposal_router — reads what the user has (topic only, or an existing draft), resolves the scheme, picks the entry stage, and assembles each downstream skill's input. Mirrors food-pipeline's intake router.
• scheme_extractor — when the scheme isn't built in, extracts its format (headings, order, limits, font, criteria) from the user's uploaded guideline/sample into a new scheme spec.
• compliance_gate — the checkpoint between stages: verifies required headings are present and in order, the length limit is met (proposal_wordcount.py), the font/ format matches, and the content addresses every assessment criterion.

Stages

Stage	Skill / agent	Deliverable	Gate
0 · SCHEME	proposal_router + scheme resolution	Target scheme spec (headings, limit, criteria)	—
1 · RESEARCH	food-deep-research (or agri-deep-research; food-research)	Knowledge base / evidence for the case	evidence sufficiency
2 · DRAFT	food-paper (or agri-paper) writing to the scheme's headings	Proposal draft in the scheme format	compliance_gate: headings + length + criteria
3 · REVIEW	food-review (or agri-review) as a mock funding panel vs the criteria	Review report + editorial decision	mandatory author decision
4 · REVISE	food-paper (revise)	Revised proposal (tracked changes; original Word opt-in)	issues resolved + still within limit
5 · FINALIZE	food-paper (format-convert)	Submission-ready proposal (.docx/PDF) to scheme format	final compliance

Slides? For a proposal pitch, food-ppt can turn the finished proposal into a deck.

From scratch vs revising an existing draft

• From scratch: run Stage 1 → 2 → 3, exactly as food-pipeline builds a paper, but to the scheme's headings and limit.
• Revising a draft (has one already): understand the field first (a food-research quick brief / reuse of any provided library, as food-pipeline does before editing), then edit to fix gaps and fit the scheme — never rewrite blindly.

Inherited (not optional)

Anti-fabrication grounding + four-gate citations, privacy scan, academic style + human-writing.md, the mandatory AI-use disclosure (some schemes, e.g. the UoM project, require stating the AI model and prompts used — put it in Acknowledgements), and the full-text-access first move for the research stage. Figures via food-figure.