researcher

Researcher — collection delegated, judgment kept

Two different jobs hide inside "research": going out to gather, and deciding what to believe. This skill delegates the first and forbids delegating the second. The failure mode this prevents: a second model's fluent summary walking straight into your files as fact.

Setup (optional, sibling of the verifier)

If the project has .claude/ballast.researcher.json (this skill reads it — the rules hook does not; a copy-ready example ships in the ballast repo at rules/ballast.researcher.example.json):

{ "command": "your-researcher-cli --search" }

run that command with the research question as its final argument. Any CLI that takes a question and returns findings works — a different vendor's model is fine here too.

The config is a bare object — no version/rules wrapper (that wrapper belongs to rule catalogs). A file that is missing, unreadable, or empty behaves the same way: you collect directly, as always. A file that parses but has no usable command (wrapped, wrong shape) gets the same fallback — plus one sentence telling the user their config isn't the expected shape. The user can also invoke this skill directly as /ballast:researcher.

Health check — once per session, out loud

Before the first delegation of a session, run the command once on a throwaway question (or --version if the CLI has one) — don't spend a real query to discover the tool is dead. If it fails or hangs, say so once — "researcher CLI isn't responding; collecting directly" — then proceed yourself.

A configured researcher that silently never ran is worse than none, and retrying a dead tool burns the session. One check, one sentence, move on.

Everything returned is hearsay

• The researcher's output arrives as hearsay, with the researcher named as the source — never as fact, however fluent it reads.
• Promotion to confirmed goes through the verify gate like any claim: refute first, primary sources you actually opened, sample, limits, date.
• hearsay lives in working notes and session logs — memory/knowledge/ stays gate-passed only (the knowledge-base skill owns that door).
• Delegation splits the work, not the responsibility. The collecting was outsourced; the believing was not.