Information Retrieval Policy

A policy for how to source factual information: when to look it up, what tool to use, which sources to trust, and how to report the result.

When this skill applies

You are about to answer a question that depends on factual information. Before producing the answer, follow the decision flow below. The goal is to avoid three common failures:

1. Over-searching — calling web_search for questions answerable from training data, wasting tokens and latency.
2. Under-searching — answering from stale internal knowledge for fluid topics, producing confidently wrong answers.
3. Wrong source hierarchy — leaning too heavily on official docs (missing practical context) or trusting forums uncritically.

Decision flow