research

A research lane runs autonomously (fire-and-report): it investigates against primary sources — vendor materials, regulations, upstream repos, recorded calls, live systems you have access to — and ends in a cited findings file linked from the driving ticket. It runs two ways: as a research ticket inside a decision map (see the decision-map skill), and standalone for any investigation worth a recorded answer.

Contract

1. Primary sources only. Read the actual material — the vendor doc, the upstream code, the regulation text, the recording. Secondary summaries are leads, not evidence.
2. The deliverable is a findings file, tracked in the repo's docs (default docs/research/<topic>.md, or the findings home the team-workflow binding doc names). Material that is PII-bearing or otherwise local-only goes in a git-ignored location instead — the findings file there is still linked from the ticket by path.
3. Findings cite their sources inline. A claim without a source is a hypothesis and is labeled as one. Distinguish clearly: what the source says, what you infer, what remains unknown.
4. Link the findings file from the ticket and summarize the feature-level answers in a ticket comment, so downstream decision rounds can cite it without opening the file.
5. Multiple research lanes may run in parallel — they share no state beyond the tracker.

When the facts are human-held

When a research lane hits facts only an external human holds (a vendor contact, a partner engineer, a pilot user), it does not stall or guess — it ends with the questionnaire terminal move: references/questionnaire.md.

Done when (checkable)

• The findings file exists at the named location, every claim cited or labeled a hypothesis.
• The driving ticket links the file and carries the feature-level summary.
• Any human-held gaps are covered by an emitted questionnaire (per the terminal move), not by silent assumptions.