best-practice-research

Best-Practice Research

Use this skill when a task depends on current external best practices, version-aware guidance, standards, official recommendations, or upstream behavior. This is a workflow wrapper: it routes evidence gathering and synthesis; it is not a new research authority and it does not replace researcher.

Purpose

Produce a cited, reusable best-practice answer or handoff that separates current external evidence from repo-local facts and dependency-selection decisions. For pre-planning investigation, this is the ordinary first research wrapper: gather official/upstream evidence, then hand it to $ralplan or the caller as planning input. Do not present $best-practice-research as a final architecture component or as a validator-gated research loop.

Terminal By Default

This skill is terminal and read-only by default. It gathers evidence and produces a cited recommendation with a handoff, then stops. Do not write or edit files, create or amend commits, run mutating commands, or otherwise modify repository state under this skill — even when the question has clear implementation implications. When called inside an already-authorized implementation task, return evidence to the caller and let it resume that task; no new workflow confirmation is needed. A standalone research request ends with the findings.

Activate When

• The user asks for best practices, recommended approach, current guidance, official recommendations, standards, or version-aware external behavior.
• $ralplan, $deep-interview, $team, or another workflow needs current external evidence before planning or execution can be correct.
• The task involves an already chosen technology and needs authoritative usage guidance, migration notes, API behavior, lifecycle rules, or current safety guidance.

Do Not Activate When

• The answer is fully repo-local; use explore for codebase facts.
• The main question is whether to adopt, replace, upgrade, or compare dependencies; use dependency-expert.
• The user only needs implementation against already-grounded requirements; use direct execution, executor, or an explicitly requested $team as appropriate.
• The task can be answered from stable local project conventions without current external lookup.