investigation

Investigation

Investigate from cheapest authoritative context toward narrowly scoped live evidence. The purpose is both diagnosis and a reliable mutation forecast.

Evidence ladder

1. Read the injected dispatch kernel -- # Your Contract (goal, role, project, the can_read menu) and # What I know about you. Do not re-derive facts it already supplies.
2. Pull what the goal needs from the substrate on demand -- none of it is preloaded, and a coordinate in the goal (a contract id, a memory slug, a brief) is an instruction to go read it. The verbs, their addressing, and the workspace rule that decides whether they resolve are in agent-protocol/read-map.md. Do not read Gaia's database directly.
3. Inspect the smallest relevant source files, tests, configuration, git diff, or runtime query. Prefer authoritative implementation over prose.
4. Record each material source immediately in the contract: files_checked, patterns_checked, commands_run, key_outputs, exact excerpts in verbatim_outputs, whatever your change reaches outside the file you were sent to in cross_layer_impacts, and uncertainty in open_gaps. When the finding needs a supporting file too large for verbatim_outputs (a full command dump, a rendered report), stage it under the canonical Gaia scratch directory (~/.gaia/scratch, never the workspace/client repo), named after the current turn's contract_id (<agent_id>.<token>, bare or with one trailing extension) so Gaia's own retention rule can attribute and reclaim it once the contract closes, then deposit it as evidence through the contract's evidence clause -- see agent-contract-handoff -- rather than leaving it as a loose file.
5. Two rules apply here, at two different levels, and they do not compete. Entering this phase at all is agent-protocol's phase-transition floor: the instant work becomes investigation, write work_phase=investigating once (or fold it into the first evidence write) -- that mark is not optional when this phase genuinely runs. WITHIN the phase, what else gets checkpointed is governed by value-at-risk, not a fixed list: write a finding the instant re-deriving it would cost more than recording it. A long synthesis that runs with no tool calls in between is the costliest case: checkpoint the gathered evidence and hypotheses before you start it (you cannot predict where it lands), then fill the conclusion the instant you reach it -- before composing the report that states it, not after. A one-file read that never reaches a costly-to-redo finding earns zero mid-turn checkpoints beyond the one phase mark; do not add ritual where nothing is at risk.