Spin up a background agent to do the research, so you keep working while it reads.

Use this for durable, primary-source research. Use last30days instead when the question is specifically about recent community discussion, sentiment, or trends.

Load the planning-contract skill (Contract version: 1) before saving findings; it owns artifact classification and handoff rules. If it is not installed, stop and request installing planning-contract rather than proceeding on inherited or invented classification rules. Never assume automatic dependency resolution.

Its job:

Investigate the question against primary sources (official docs, source code, specs, first-party APIs), not a secondary write-up of them. Follow every claim back to the source that owns it.
Write the findings to a single Markdown note, citing each claim's source.
Save it as research evidence: investigations, design studies, and probe reports belong under the project's research directory (project/research/ by default; legacy docs/research/). Depart from that default only via the project's explicit mapping in project/agents/artifacts.md (legacy docs/agents/artifacts.md) or an explicit owner decision. When research notes already exist elsewhere, inspect that established convention and report it — with any conflict against the mapping or default — for an owner decision instead of silently adopting it; a research note found under the specs directory is misclassification evidence to report, not a convention to copy. Link the note from the owning specification or design when one exists.

Approval boundary

Research is evidence, even when the owner accepts its findings. Acceptance of findings is never authorization to build; behavioral contracts with acceptance criteria belong in the project's specs directory (project/specs/; legacy docs/specs/) and are shaped by shape-design. When handing findings to another skill, record the contract version and the available installed provenance, or unknown if exact provenance is unavailable.

Provenance

Adapted from mattpocock/skills at commit 3cca18b368ae95cdbdebbff572ccafa662551015 (MIT).