research

Research — Web Investigation with Written Output

The research skill is how external knowledge enters the workflow. It runs WebFetch and WebSearch, synthesizes the findings, and produces a markdown report that other skills can cite.

Scope

Research is about understanding, not decision-making. Produce a report; do not produce an ADR. Decisions come later — in modeling or work — and they cite research reports.

Inputs

Accept one of:

• A concrete question ("how do people implement optimistic locking in event-sourced systems?")
• A topic area ("rate limiting strategies")
• A library/product name ("Temporal.io — what does it do and who uses it?")

If the request is vague ("research auth"), narrow it once with the user before running.

Running

Delegate to the researcher agent. The researcher will:

1. Start with WebSearch for a breadth pass
2. Follow up with WebFetch on the most promising 3–7 sources
3. If multiple independent angles exist, run them in parallel (multiple WebSearch/WebFetch tool calls in the same message)
4. Cross-check claims across sources — single-source claims get flagged as such
5. Write the report

When the researcher returns, the report is not yet citable. Every report goes through the review gate (below) before any task, ADR, or modeling session is allowed to cite it. Keep this gate inside the research skill — at the researcher-spawn boundary — so every caller (brainstorm, model, work all trigger research internally) inherits it without each one re-implementing the check.

Report format

Files land at .agentheim/knowledge/research/<slug>-<date>.md:

---
topic: [one-line topic]
date: 2026-04-24
requested_by: [brainstorm | model | work | user]
related_tasks: []
---

# Research: [Topic]

## Question
What we wanted to know, in one or two sentences.

## Summary
3–6 bullet answers. Lead with what's decision-relevant, not with what's novel.

## Findings
Subsections as needed. Each claim cites its source(s). Disagreements
between sources are named, not hidden.

## Sources
Numbered list with URL, title, and one-line relevance note per source.

## Unverified claims
Only present when the review gate hit its cap with claims no primary
source could settle. Each is also marked inline in Findings as
`⚠️ UNVERIFIED`. (Omit this section entirely when there are none.)

## Open questions
Things we wanted to answer and couldn't, or that would need primary research.

A checkable claim that survived the gate without a primary source is marked inline where it appears — … the price is $0.40 / M tokens ⚠️ UNVERIFIED (no public pricing page found) — and collected in the ## Unverified claims subsection. This is the terminal state for the genuinely-uncheckable: labeled, never silently asserted.

Review gate (post-write, pre-cite)

A report the researcher returns is not yet citable. Every report goes through the research-review gate — a separate research-reviewer agent re-verifies the report's decision-critical checkable claims against primary sources, with fresh context and its own web access. This is the structural defense against plausible-but-wrong facts, mirroring how work gates plausible-but-wrong code through the verifier.

The full doctrine lives in skills/research-review/SKILL.md. The operational integration here:

When to skip the gate

Skip (ship immediately) only when:

• The user invoked research with --no-verify or said "skip review this run" — opt-out is per-run, never persistent.
• The report makes no checkable claims at all (pure synthesis of the user's own context) — rare; when unsure, run the gate.

Otherwise, gate.

Gate dispatch and the loop

1. Track the iteration count for this report (start at 1).
2. Spawn a research-reviewer subagent via Agent with subagent_type: "research-reviewer" using the Research-Reviewer Prompt Template below. Hand it only the report path, the original question, and the iteration number — never the researcher's reasoning trail. (agentheim pins no model, to stay provider-agnostic; if your setup lets you route the reviewer to a different or more skeptical model than the researcher, prefer that — it decorrelates shared blind spots. See skills/research-review/SKILL.md.)
3. Wait for the verdict and handle it:

VERDICT: PASS → the report is citable. Proceed to indexing and protocol logging below.

VERDICT: SKIP → ship as on PASS; note "review skipped: no checkable claims" in the protocol entry.

VERDICT: FAIL, iteration 1 or 2, ITERATION_HINT: likely-fixable → re-dispatch the researcher (not the reviewer) with the reviewer's CHALLENGED_CLAIMS block verbatim. Instruct it to re-verify each challenged claim against the named PRIMARY_SOURCE, correct what's wrong, and re-run the gate (iteration = N + 1). Cap at 3 iterations — mirror work's verifier cap.

VERDICT: FAIL, iteration 3 (or any iteration with ITERATION_HINT: genuinely-unverifiable) → stop looping. Re-dispatch the researcher one final time to label, not block: for each surviving challenged claim, mark it inline ⚠️ UNVERIFIED (with a one-line reason) and add it to the report's ## Unverified claims subsection. Then ship. Surviving unverified claims are never silently passed and never infinitely looped.

Research-Reviewer Prompt Template

Spawn each reviewer with Agent(subagent_type: "research-reviewer", prompt: <the-below>). Fill the placeholders.

You are a research-reviewer agent auditing one report with fresh context and your own web access. You have no exposure to the researcher's reasoning — only the report and the original question. Re-verify; do not proofread.

## Your inputs
Report (read-only — do NOT edit it): <ABSOLUTE-PATH>
Original question the research was meant to answer: <QUESTION>
Iteration: <N> of max 3

## Your job
Follow the checks in `agents/research-reviewer.md`, in order. Inventory the report's checkable claims, then independently re-verify the decision-critical ones against PRIMARY sources using your own WebSearch/WebFetch — do not trust the report's adjacent citations. Return exactly one verdict block — VERDICT: PASS, VERDICT: FAIL, or VERDICT: SKIP — per the strict formats in your agent definition.

Do not use Write or Edit — you are read-only on the report. Re-verify with the web; do not fix the report.

When the research skill spawned multiple researchers in parallel for independent topics, gate each report with its own reviewer; launch the reviewers as parallel Agent calls in one message. Each reviewer sees only its own report.

Linking back

When a research report influences a task or decision:

• The task's Notes section gets a link to the report
• The task's related_research frontmatter gets the report's slug (so workers pre-load it)
• The ADR (if one results) gets the report in its references and its related_research frontmatter
• The report's frontmatter related_tasks gets updated

This bidirectional linking is how knowledge stays findable.

Updating indexes

After the researcher writes the report, update the index entries so the report is discoverable. Index template lives at references/index-template.md.

• If the report's related_tasks are all in one BC, or the topic is clearly scoped to one BC → insert under <!-- research-local:start --> in contexts/<bc>/INDEX.md.
• If the report spans multiple BCs, has no tasks yet, or is project-level → insert under <!-- research-global:start --> in .agentheim/knowledge/index.md.

If the target INDEX.md doesn't exist yet, create it from references/index-template.md first.

A later task or ADR that adopts this report should update the inserted line's BC scope if it migrates from global to BC-local (rare).

Protocol logging

After the report clears the review gate, prepend an entry to .agentheim/knowledge/protocol.md (creating the file with its header if missing — see brainstorm/modeling/work skills for the header template):

## YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM -- Research: [topic]

**Type:** Research
**Requested by:** brainstorm | model | work | user
**Report:** knowledge/research/<slug>-<date>.md
**Review:** PASS (iteration N) | labeled-unverified (iteration 3) | skipped (no checkable claims)
**Summary:** [2-3 bullet findings]

---

Parallelism

Research is naturally parallelizable. If the user asks for research on multiple distinct topics, spawn multiple researcher agents rather than serializing. Each writes its own report.

What NOT to do

• Do not fetch URLs the user did not authorize and that you don't have independent reason to trust
• Do not paraphrase without source attribution — readers need to trace claims
• Do not write advocacy — the report should leave the decision to the reader
• Do not let research scope-creep into a dissertation. Stop when the question is answered to decision-adequate depth.