Ask an AI to write a paper and it will happily report favorable numbers for experiments it never ran — this "plausible fabrication" has been the real wall for research automation. Earlier automated-research systems poured effort into standing up dedicated agent infrastructure and forcing a single clean story to completion. But somewhere in the long generation, factual integrity would fray, and unsupported claims slipped straight into the paper. Behind the flashy results, the foundation of reliability was quietly missing. Spark-to-Paper flips the framing. Instead of a new agent platform, it implements paper generation as 13 composable skills running inside Claude Code. The key is separation: context-dependent judgment goes to the model, while citation checks and LaTeX compilation go to deterministic code. Experiments fix their metrics and table structure before results are observed, blocking post-hoc adaptation. And a "Self-Refutation Loop" — endlessly revising a hypothesis the evidence keeps rejecting — is capped at seven cycles, recording failure as failure and moving on to a different direction. The results speak clearly. Citation validity hits 99.5%, above the human-preprint average, and fabrication detection climbs from 14% single-pass to 92% with the full adversarial-review stack. At roughly $8.1 and 3.2 hours per manuscript, you get a paper complete with editable figures. Rather than dressing every attempt up as success, it centers evidence integrity and the acceptance that "not every research direction works." A thought-provoking blueprint for reliability in long-horizon AI. Spark-to-Paper: End-to-End Research Paper Generation as a Composable Skill #AIResearch# #AgentSkills#