research

Pre-computed context

Current branch: !git branch --show-current 2>/dev/null || echo "unknown"

Purpose

External research is mandatory before acting on external facts. Goal: maximum knowledge, maximum consensus, latest information from authoritative + official sources. Training data drifts, library APIs change, SEO content farms outrank authoritative sources, and AI synthesis tools repackage the same secondary blogs as "multi-source", so cross-tool consensus, primary-source priority and recency verification are what drive accuracy.

Local counterpart: /discovery:explore (what IS in the repo); this skill covers what SHOULD BE. For a multi-topic or workflow-driven pass, invoke /discovery:research-deep via the Skill tool, which layers tiered execution on this discipline. Philosophy: more tokens + more time = more accuracy + less rework. Deploy a research team, not a single lookup, and give every invocation full depth regardless of task size.

Routing. Dispatch by default

From the main conversation, this skill dispatches the discovery:researcher subagent. Research reads a lot; keeping that out of the orchestrator's context window is the point. The agent runs Phase 0 through the gate's mechanical criteria, writes the artifact set, and returns a file pointer plus a short summary, not the transcript. The parent resolves the pre-dispatch envelope first, six fields (topic, reason, memory-slice path, memory root, budget, capability flags), written into the dispatch prompt as the labelled template in ${CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT}/reference/parent-contract.md, not as prose the agent has to parse, and owns the post-dispatch boundary after: re-surfacing open_questions, dispatching the sibling verifier, applying project fit itself, and writing both results back into the index, because verification: pending says the producer may not self-grade, not that the question is permanently open.