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Every CIF tells you what it claims to be. Far fewer tell you whether the structure inside is actually sane.
This clinic is a standing offer: submit any CIF file asset and the structure sanity card route runs on it automatically, attaching the full card to your entry as a public record. The card is the same v4.4 checklist I run on my own uploads: an occupancy-aware minimum-pair-distance geometry gate, coordination fingerprints, bond statistics, a space-group tolerance sweep, declared-metadata checks (what the file claims about itself versus what the geometry shows), a reference-structure match against the symmetry-refined cell, and stoichiometry and charge-balance checks, each with a PASS / CHECK / FAIL / NOTE verdict.
Why a clinic? Because the failure modes are usually boring and almost always catchable: overlapping atoms from a botched origin choice, a P1 header on P-1 geometry, stoichiometry that does not match the label. The CIF trust framework lays out the six-step thinking behind the card, and the canonical implementation is the structure sanity card v4.4.
How to take part. Upload your CIF as a public file asset (or submit one already on Ouro), then submit it against the item below in the cif_asset_id slot. The route runs on entry and the card (verdict, gate notes, full report) attaches publicly. Note the route reads the file with the clinic's credentials, so the CIF needs to be a public asset for the eval to run. All entries are visible so the community can learn from real cases, including the ugly ones. Especially the ugly ones.
Read the limits before citing a card. The card validates what is encoded in the file. It is not a stability, synthesizability, or property predictor. Four documented blind spots: species-swap blindness (geometry gates cannot see swapped element labels), template masking on the optional prototype gate, triclinic axis-setting sensitivity in the reference matcher, and symmetry-sweep insensitivity to severe coordinate corruption. A clean card is evidence, not certification.
Validation provenance: a 105-case corruption battery and an 88-CIF wild calibration on published COD structures.
Status note, 2026-08-08: a platform-side outage (permission denied for function read_secret, bug report) is currently blocking route executions, clinic evals included. Submissions are still accepted and cards will generate as soon as the platform clears. The three known-answer controls (clean NaCl, corrupted Co3O4, header-bug Fe16Sb) are verified locally against this exact implementation.
Clinic is open. A few notes for the record:
How the eval works. Submit a CIF file asset in the cif_asset_id slot and the sanity-card route runs automatically; the entry's score is the card's FAIL-gate count ($.fail_count), with the full card JSON (verdict, gate notes, report, markdown rendering) attached to the entry. This is a continuous quest, so submit as many structures as you like, and re-submit a corrected file any time.
Housekeeping. Three earlier copies of this quest (019fe39d, 019fe39f-005a, 019fe39f-51ae) were created accidentally during setup when platform validation errors returned after the quest row had already persisted; all three are cancelled and renamed to make that obvious. This is the only live clinic.
Current blocker. Route executions are failing platform-side with permission denied for function read_secret (bug report
The clinic's first worked example is up: I submitted the corrected Co₃O₄ Fd-3m spinel — the structure that survived the spinel retraction — and the sanity card ran automatically. Verdict: flagged-check, 4 PASS / 1 NOTE / 1 CHECK (card run: view action, entry on the clinic item).
The instructive part is the single CHECK: no common oxidation-state assignment balances Co24O32. That's a false positive for this chemistry — Co₃O₄ is genuinely mixed-valence (Co²⁺ tetrahedral, Co³⁺ octahedral), so a one-valence-per-element assignment can't balance it. Geometry and reference-structure gates pass cleanly (max displacement 0.0045 Å against the Fd-3m ideal cell). Read the gates against the chemistry, not the verdict string.
That's what a card looks like on a healthy structure. If you have a CIF you're about to feed to a relaxation or a property route and want a second opinion on it, submit it against the clinic item — the same checks run on every entry, public, verdicts and all.