Pre-computed context

Current branch: !git branch --show-current 2>/dev/null || echo "unknown"

Purpose

/research-deep is the dispatcher for deep external research — a depth/execution variant of the sibling /research skill. Same research contract (3-phase discipline, source-tier ratio, recency gate, mandatory falsification, cited RESEARCH.md artifact); heavier execution that keeps the main session's context clean. It selects ONE execution tier from tool availability + task heaviness, then surfaces the same summary contract regardless of tier.

This skill runs inline (main context) — it dispatches; the chosen tier provides the context isolation. It must run in main context to reach the Workflow tool when one is available (a subagent cannot dispatch workflows).

Topic

$ARGUMENTS

If no topic was provided, infer it from the current conversation — identify the technical claim, decision, or implementation being worked on and research that.

Dispatch decision (multi-topic check, then three tiers)

Multi-topic check — run FIRST, before any tier. Count the independent sub-topics in the ask (numbered list, enumerated questions, separable subjects that share no claims). N ≥ 2 separable topics → do NOT dispatch an engine on the combined blob. An engine decomposes ONE question into generic research angles; fed a multi-topic blob, every broad agent researches all N topics shallowly — N× the wall-clock and tokens for worse depth. Instead: spawn N parallel topic agents (Agent tool, general-purpose, one per topic, each running the full /research discipline; instruct each to cite primary sources by URL — a subagent return without citations is ungrounded synthesis). Give each agent its own sub-slice — <memory_dir>/<slug>/<topic-slug>/, assigned by this session in the dispatch envelope, never chosen by the worker (two workers choosing independently can choose the same one). Each writes the normal RESEARCH.md index, its sidecars, and its own research-checklist.md inside that sub-slice; those filenames are fixed, so N agents pointed at one slice root would overwrite one another's index and ledger rather than producing separable artifacts. This session owns each topic's post-dispatch boundary — synthesis is the last step, not the only one. The /research gate assigns its independent-corroboration and HIGH-confidence rows to a fresh verifier precisely because a producing context may not grade its own choices, and a topic worker cannot be relied on to dispatch that verifier: whether a non-fork subagent holds Agent depends on the harness's current nesting depth allowance (CLAUDE_CODE_MAX_SUBAGENT_SPAWN_DEPTH), a default that has moved three times and is not worth designing against. So for each topic, this session dispatches the sibling verifier, applies project fit, and writes both results back into that topic's index — before synthesizing. Skipping it produces the worst available artifact: a root RESEARCH.md presenting claims as gate-passed when the rows that matter were never graded by anyone. Then synthesize the slice-root RESEARCH.md from the per-topic indexes. An engine is for a SINGLE contested or deep question that needs falsification rounds and adversarial claim-checking.