research
The facts
Its description
Investigate a question against high-trust primary sources and capture the findings as a Markdown file in the repo. Use when the user wants a topic researched, docs or API facts gathered, or reading legwork delegated to a background agent.
The description the agent reads to decide when to use it.
When it starts
The agent picks this skill when someone asks for a topic to be investigated and the findings written down — gathering docs or API facts, or delegating the reading legwork to a background agent that works while the main conversation continues.
Things a person might say (the model's guesses)
- “Can you research how Stripe's webhook signature verification actually works and write it up?”
- “I need the real facts on Postgres advisory locks — dig into the docs and save notes in the repo.”
- “Delegate the reading on this to a background agent and leave me a Markdown file with sources.”
A model's summary of when it is used.
What leads to it
- ask-matt hands off to this when you want to delegate reading legwork ask-matt, line 88
- wayfinder calls this only for research tickets wayfinder, line 77
Other skills that hand off to this one, call it, require it or offer it instead, as a model read them.
Licence
MIT, from LICENSE
The terms its author shares it under, which let it be shown here.
Other files in this skill (1) Close
The text
Spin up a background agent to do the research, so you keep working while it reads. Start it with a fresh context window.
Its job:
- Investigate the question against primary sources (official docs, source code, specs, first-party APIs), not a secondary write-up of them. Follow every claim back to the source that owns it.
- Write the findings to a single Markdown file, citing each claim's source.
- Save it where the repo already keeps such notes; match the existing convention, and if there is none, put it somewhere sensible and say where.
From mattpocock/skills at 4ae2317, 2026-10-31. Skills read by DeepSeek V4.1 Flash on 2026-11-04. Summary and techniques by Claude Opus 5.5 on 2026-11-06.