topic

Research AI/ML topic literature. Return actionable findings: SOTA methods, best fit, concrete implementation plan. Skill = orchestrator — gathers codebase context, delegates literature search to researcher agent, packages results into structured report.

NOT for deep single-paper analysis or experiment design — use research:scientist directly for hypothesis generation, ablation design, experiment validation.

• $ARGUMENTS: one of:
  • <topic> — topic, method name, or problem description (e.g. "object detection for small objects", "efficient transformers", "self-supervised pretraining for medical images")
  • plan — produce phased implementation plan from most recent research output (auto-detected from .temp/)
  • plan <path-to-output.md> — produce plan from specific existing research output file
  • --team — multi-agent mode; spawns 2–3 researcher teammates for topics with 3+ competing method families and no SOTA consensus; ~7× token cost vs single-agent mode

• Key boundary: end of Step 2 — SOTA literature gathered and written to AGENT_OUT; before Step 3 report synthesis.
• Preserve: AGENT_OUT path (TMPDIR key), BRANCH (TMPDIR key), DATE (TMPDIR key), REPORT_OUT target path, topic string from ARGUMENTS.
• Clear at Step 1 start (stale prior run) and at follow-up gate (terminal action).

Agent Resolution

Agent resolution: load and follow the protocol below. Contains: foundry check + fallback table. Foundry not installed → substitute each foundry:X with general-purpose per table. Agents this skill uses: foundry:web-explorer, foundry:solution-architect.

# loads: compaction-contract.md
export CSID="${CLAUDE_CODE_SESSION_ID:-$PPID}"
_RESEARCH_SHARED=$(python "${CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT:-plugins/cc_research}/bin/resolve_shared.py" 2>/dev/null)  # timeout: 5000
[ -z "$_RESEARCH_SHARED" ] && { echo "! Plugin path resolution failed — ensure research plugin installed and CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT set, or invoke from project root."; exit 1; }
echo "$_RESEARCH_SHARED" > "${TMPDIR:-/tmp}/research-shared-${CSID}"  # cold resolve — every later site reads this sentinel instead of re-running python
cat "$_RESEARCH_SHARED/agent-resolution.md"

Task hygiene: Before creating tasks, call TaskList. For each found task:

• status completed if work clearly done
• status deleted if orphaned / no longer relevant
• keep in_progress only if genuinely continuing

Task tracking: per CLAUDE.md, create tasks (TaskCreate) for each major phase — paper collection, researcher analysis, report generation. Mark in_progress/completed throughout. Always create "Print report header" as its own task (all paths — single-agent Step 3, --team, plan) — in_progress right after the report file is written (by the lead directly, or by a spawned consolidator's returned envelope); completed only once the --- header has actually appeared in this response. This task exists because a sibling skill (oss:review) had an incident where a report was written correctly but the terminal print step got silently skipped while the hard-enforced AskUserQuestion fired anyway — tracking the print as its own task makes it as trackable as the tool calls around it. The shared ## Follow-up gate below must not fire while this task is pending/in_progress.