Files
skills/docs/engineering/research.md
Matt Pocock 3314257466 docs: drop the Quickstart block from all 25 pages
aihero.dev renders an install widget above every skill page. Each page
then repeated the same commands in its body, and the two copies had
drifted: the widget uses the current `npx skills@latest ...` wording
while the hand-written blocks mostly carried the older bare `npx skills
...`. Pages showed the right command and a stale one together.

Delete the block from all 25 pages and record the rule in
.agents/writing-docs.md: install wording belongs to the site, not the
page. The template no longer carries a Quickstart, and
.agents/install-block.md notes that docs pages are not one of its
consumers.
2026-08-05 11:22:19 +01:00

1.7 KiB

Source

What it does

research answers a question by reading the sources that own the answer and leaving a cited Markdown file behind. It works only from primary sources — official docs, source code, specs, first-party APIs — never a secondary write-up of them, so what it saves is traceable back to something authoritative rather than a summary of a summary.

When to reach for it

Type /research, or the agent reaches for it automatically when a task turns into reading legwork.

Reach for it when the next step is finding something out — how an API behaves, what a spec actually says, whether a claim holds — and you'd rather not stall your own thread doing the reading. For sharpening a plan by interview instead of by reading, use grilling; for exploring what to build with throwaway code, use prototype.

Delegated legwork

The defining move is that the reading runs as a background agent. You keep working; it goes off, follows each claim back to its primary source, and drops a single cited Markdown file into wherever the repo keeps such notes. Research is legwork you delegate, not thinking you outsource — you get back a document to react to, with its sources attached.

Where it fits

A reach-for-it-anytime standalone that feeds the thinking skills: the file it produces is something to grill, plan, or design against, so it sits upstream of work like grilling and to-spec rather than in the build chain. For the whole map, see ask-matt.