/research — Focused Investigation

When to Use

• Evaluating whether a dependency has a newer version or has been superseded
• Finding community best practices for a specific technical problem
• Reading official documentation for an API or library
• Investigating how other projects solve a similar problem
• Checking if a pattern used in the codebase has known issues
• Any time you need external information before making a decision

Don't use when: the question has 3+ independent sub-questions (use /research-fleet for parallel scouts); you need to act on findings immediately (use /marshal which calls /research internally).

Protocol

Step 1: FORMULATE

Convert the research question into 2-4 specific search queries:

• Official docs query (e.g., "express.js middleware error handling docs")