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.

Standalone lanes still ride the tracker

A research lane outside a map follows the same discipline a map ticket would: claim the driving ticket per the repo's claim recipe before investigating, and title the session with the item (default #<N> — <short item name>, per the orchestrate skill's lane titling), so parallel lanes stay legible on the picker and the tracker alike. An investigation with no driving ticket gets one filed first: the findings need somewhere durable to land.

The skeptic pass

Findings that will drive a build decision face a skeptic before they are reported: dispatch an independent subagent whose brief is to kill each load-bearing claim: re-read the cited source, hunt the contradicting primary material, check versions and dates. A claim the skeptic kills is corrected or relabeled a hypothesis; the findings file records that the pass ran and what it changed. When nothing downstream builds on the findings, the pass is optional; say which way you called it in the ticket summary.

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: verify each line before reporting complete)

• 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.
• Standalone lane: the discipline in "Standalone lanes still ride the tracker" held: check the claim and the title on the tracker and picker, not your memory of doing it.
• The skeptic pass ran or was skipped per its section above, and the call is recorded in the ticket summary.
• Any human-held gaps are covered by an emitted questionnaire (per the terminal move), not by silent assumptions.

Attribution

This skill is adapted from Matt Pocock's skills (MIT), and follows them closely: research, a background agent investigating against primary sources, following every claim back to the source that owns it, leaving a cited Markdown file in the repo, and to-questionnaire, which the questionnaire terminal move tracks structure for structure: "grill the send, not the subject" is his phrase, and the gap-targeted questions, most-important-first ordering, answer stubs, welcome for partial answers, and closing catch-all are his design. The tracker half of the lane framing is his wayfinder's: research tickets run fire-and-report, in parallel, linked from the driving issue.

What this repo adds: the standalone-lane discipline (the claim recipe and session titling, the findings home, the PII carve-out) and the skeptic pass.