research-deep

Pre-computed context

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

Purpose

/discovery:research-deep is the dispatcher for deep external research, a depth/execution variant of the sibling /discovery:research skill. Same research contract (3-phase discipline, source-tier ratio, recency gate, mandatory falsification, cited RESEARCH.md artifact); heavier execution that keeps the main session's context clean. It selects ONE execution tier from tool availability + task heaviness, then surfaces the same summary contract regardless of tier.

This skill runs inline (main context). It dispatches; the chosen tier provides the context isolation. It must run in main context because that is the only place both of its requirements hold, the Workflow tool, absent from every non-fork subagent, and a dependable Agent spawn, which no subagent is guaranteed to hold: see the Dispatching this skill itself gotcha.

Topic

$ARGUMENTS

If no topic was provided, infer it from the current conversation. Identify the technical claim, decision, or implementation being worked on and research that.

Caveat, a ${CLAUDE_…}-shaped token in a topic may not arrive as you typed it, and this skill carries the highest exposure of the three because a corrupted topic here is copied into every envelope of an N-way fan-out. What was observed, what is documented, what is not, and the per-topic echo-back check: ${CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT}/reference/parent-contract.md ("A different question").

Dispatch decision (multi-topic check, then three tiers)

Multi-topic check. Run FIRST, before any tier. Count the independent sub-topics in the ask (numbered list, enumerated questions, separable subjects that share no claims). N ≥ 2 separable topics → do NOT dispatch an engine on the combined blob. An engine decomposes ONE question into generic research angles; fed a multi-topic blob, every broad agent researches all N topics shallowly. N× the wall-clock and tokens for worse depth. Instead: spawn N parallel discovery:researcher agents (Agent tool, one per topic), each dispatched with the full envelope below. Cap N at roughly a dozen. Past that, narrow the ask with the user before dispatching. Give each agent its own sub-slice. <memory_dir>/<slug>/<topic-slug>/, assigned by this session in the dispatch envelope, never chosen by the worker (two workers choosing independently can choose the same one); the memory root travels as its own envelope field, since a worker handed a nested sub-slice path cannot tell from that path alone which ancestor is the configured root. Each writes the normal RESEARCH.md index, its sidecars, and its own research-checklist.md inside that sub-slice; those filenames are fixed, so N agents pointed at one slice root would overwrite one another's index and ledger rather than producing separable artifacts. This session owns each topic's post-dispatch boundary. Synthesis is the last step, not the only one. Close "The post-dispatch boundary" below for each topic, then synthesize the slice-root RESEARCH.md from the per-topic indexes. Skipping it produces the worst available artifact: a root RESEARCH.md presenting claims as gate-passed when the rows that matter were never graded by anyone. An engine is for a SINGLE contested or deep question that needs falsification rounds and adversarial claim-checking.