Research

Deep Research

General-purpose deep research with multi-source synthesis, confidence scoring, source-support auditing, and anti-hallucination verification. The design follows current deep-research patterns: plan before retrieval, start broad then narrow, coordinate parallel workers through a lead agent, audit whether cited sources actually support each claim, use perspective expansion for breadth, and synthesize into a report rather than a source dump.

Canonical Vocabulary

Use these canonical terms exactly in plans, journals, delegated task prompts, and final reports.

| Term | Definition | |------|-----------| | query | The user's research question or topic; the unit of investigation | | claim | A discrete assertion to be verified; extracted from sources or user input | | source | A specific origin of information: URL, document, database record, or API response | | evidence | A source-backed datum supporting or contradicting a claim; always has provenance | | provenance | The chain from evidence to source: tool used, URL, access timestamp, excerpt | | confidence | Score 0.0-1.0 per claim; based on evidence strength and cross-validation | | cross-validation | Verifying a claim across 2+ independent sources; the core anti-hallucination mechanism | | triangulation | Confirming a finding using 3+ methodologically diverse sources | | contradiction | When two credible sources assert incompatible claims; must be surfaced explicitly | | synthesis | The final research product: not a summary but a novel integration of evidence with analysis | | plan gate | A compact, reviewable research plan produced after triage and before substantial retrieval | | source-support audit | Statement-level check that each cited source actually supports the claim attached to it | | support matrix | Table mapping each claim to each cited source with supports, partial, contradicts, or irrelevant | | citation anchor | The specific excerpt, section, or data row used to connect a source to a claim | | support status | Per-claim/per-source classification: supports, partial, contradicts, or irrelevant | | effort budget | Bounded search/delegation plan covering expected workers, source count, depth, and stop conditions | | journal | The saved markdown record of a research session, stored in ~/.{gemini|copilot|codex|claude}/research/ | | sweep | Wave 1: broad parallel search across multiple tools and sources | | deep dive | Wave 2: targeted follow-up on specific leads from the sweep | | lead | A promising source or thread identified during the sweep, warranting deeper investigation | | tier | Complexity classification: Quick (0-2), Standard (3-5), Deep (6-8), Exhaustive (9-10) | | finding | A verified claim with evidence chain, confidence score, and provenance; the atomic unit of output | | gap | An identified area where evidence is insufficient, contradictory, or absent | | bias marker | An explicit flag on a finding indicating potential bias (recency, authority, LLM prior, etc.) | | degraded mode | Operation when research tools are unavailable; confidence ceilings applied | | capability | A research ability such as web search, docs lookup, extraction, or subagent delegation; tool names are preferred implementations, not guarantees |

Dispatch

| $ARGUMENTS | Action | |---|---| | Question or topic text (has verb or ?) | Investigate — classify complexity, execute wave pipeline | | Vague input ( or verify | **Fact-check** — verify claim against 3+ search engines | | compare vs [vs ...] | **Compare** — structured comparison with decision matrix output | | survey | **Survey** — landscape mapping, annotated bibliography | | track | **Track** — load prior journal, search for updates since last session | | resume [number or keyword] | **Resume** — resume a saved research session | | list [active, domain, tier] | **List** — show journal metadata table | | archive | **Archive** — move journals older than 90 days | | delete | **Delete** — delete journal N with confirmation | | export [N]` | Export — render HTML dashboard for journal N (default: current) | | Empty | Gallery — show topic examples + "ask me anything" prompt |

Auto-Detection Heuristic

If no mode keyword matches:

1. Ends with ? or starts with question word (who/what/when/where/why/how/is/are/can/does/should/will) → Investigate
2. Contains vs, versus, compared to, or between noun phrases → Compare
3. Declarative statement with factual claim, no question syntax → Fact-check
4. Broad field name with no specific question → ask: "Investigate a specific question, or survey the entire field?"
5. Ambiguous → ask: "Would you like me to investigate this question, verify this claim, or survey this field?"

Plan Gate

Produce a triage packet before substantial retrieval for Standard, Deep, and Exhaustive research:

1. Restate the research question, audience, assumptions, constraints, and high-stakes or private-source risks.
2. Show complexity score, tier, mode, source difficulty, verification complexity, and effort budget.
3. List sub-questions, source families, planned worker lanes, retrieval/extraction capabilities, and degraded-mode limits.
4. State the source-support audit strategy, including how citation anchors and support statuses will be checked.
5. State whether execution continues immediately or pauses for user review.

Pause conditions override continue conditions. Pause for user input when the topic is high-stakes, ambiguous after triage, asks for private or credentialed sources, or the user explicitly requests plan review. When pause is due to user-pivotal scope or audience uncertainty, apply instructions/global.md Depth routing and invoke /grill-me before substantial retrieval. Factual or evidence gaps stay on the research Plan Gate, not grill-me. In noninteractive harnesses, emit the Plan Gate with blockers and stop before substantial retrieval for those pause cases. Continue without waiting only when the question is clear, non-sensitive, and has no pause condition. Quick tier may skip the formal gate but must include a short methodology note in the answer.

Gallery (Empty Arguments)

Present research examples spanning domains:

| # | Domain | Example | Likely Tier | |---|--------|---------|-------------| | 1 | Technology | "What are the current best practices for LLM agent architectures?" | Deep | | 2 | Academic | "What is the state of evidence on intermittent fasting for longevity?" | Standard | | 3 | Market | "How does the competitive landscape for vector databases compare?" | Deep | | 4 | Fact-check | "Is it true that 90% of startups fail within the first year?" | Standard | | 5 | Architecture | "When should you choose event sourcing over CRUD?" | Standard | | 6 | Trends | "What emerging programming languages gained traction in 2025-2026?" | Standard |

> Pick a number, paste your own question, or type guide me.

Skill Awareness

Before starting research, check if another skill is a better fit:

| Signal | Redirect | |--------|----------| | Code review, PR review, diff analysis | Suggest /review | | Strategic decision with adversaries, game theory | Suggest /wargame | | Multi-perspective expert debate | Suggest /host-panel | | Prompt optimization, model-specific prompting | Suggest /prompt-engineer |

If the user confirms they want general research, proceed.

For repo-owned CLI skill-first routing (/ffmpeg, /yt-dlp, /trafilatura, /pentest), see the Repo CLI skills table in references/source-selection.md.

Complexity Classification

Score the query on 5 dimensions (0-2 each, total 0-10):

| Dimension | 0 | 1 | 2 | |-----------|---|---|---| | Scope breadth | Single fact/definition | Multi-faceted, 2-3 domains | Cross-disciplinary, 4+ domains | | Source difficulty | Top search results suffice | Specialized databases or multiple source types | Paywalled, fragmented, or conflicting sources | | Temporal sensitivity | Stable/historical | Evolving field (months matter) | Fast-moving (days/weeks matter), active controversy | | Verification complexity | Easily verifiable (official docs) | 2-3 independent sources needed | Contested claims, expert disagreement, no consensus | | Synthesis demand | Answer is a fact or list | Compare/contrast viewpoints | Novel integration of conflicting threads |

| Total | Tier | Strategy | |-------|------|----------| | 0-2 | Quick | Inline, 1-2 searches, fire-and-forget | | 3-5 | Standard | Subagent wave, 3-5 parallel searchers, report delivered | | 6-8 | Deep | Agent team (TeamCreate), 3-5 teammates, interactive session | | 9-10 | Exhaustive | Agent team, 4-6 teammates + nested subagent waves, interactive |

Present the scoring through the Plan Gate for Standard, Deep, and Exhaustive work. User can override tier with --depth .

Scaling Strategy

Scale work by query complexity and available orchestration capabilities:

| Scope | Strategy | Delegation | |-------|----------|------------| | Quick (0-2) | Inline answer after 1-2 searches | No subagents | | Standard (3-5) | Parallel broad sweep across 2-5 sub-questions | Use available subagent primitive; otherwise batch sequentially | | Deep (6-8) | Lead-driven team workflow with perspective expansion | Use team/subagent primitives when present; otherwise bounded serial waves | | Exhaustive (9-10) | Deep workflow plus adversarial and nested waves | Use nested delegation when available; otherwise state degraded throughput explicitly |

Capability resolution: Treat named tools and orchestration APIs as preferred capabilities. Claude Code may use Task/TeamCreate; Codex may use dynamic subagents or parallel tool calls; other agents may use their native delegation or run the wave pipeline serially. If no delegation equivalent exists, use degraded orchestration: preserve wave order, reduce breadth, and report the limitation in methodology. Apply confidence ceilings only when source or retrieval capabilities are unavailable, per references/source-selection.md.

Effort budgeting: Bound every Standard+ run before retrieval. State target worker count, expected source count, search depth, extraction depth, and stop conditions. Start broad, then narrow: Wave 1 maximizes source and perspective coverage; Wave 2 spends depth only on high-value leads; Wave 3 spends verification budget on claims likely to survive synthesis.

Wave Pipeline

All non-Quick research follows this 5-wave pipeline. Quick merges Waves 0+1+4 inline.

Wave 0: Triage (always inline, never parallelized)

1. Run !uv run python scripts/research-scanner.py "$ARGUMENTS" for deterministic pre-scan
2. Decompose query into 2-5 sub-questions
3. Score complexity on the 5-dimension rubric
4. Check tool availability — probe key retrieval, extraction, and delegation capabilities; set degraded mode flags and confidence ceilings per references/source-selection.md
5. Select tools per domain signals — read references/source-selection.md
6. Check for existing journals — if track or resume, load prior state
7. Run the Plan Gate — show: complexity score, sub-questions, source families, worker lanes, support-audit strategy, effort budget, estimated tier, and whether execution continues immediately or pauses. User may override.

Wave 1: Broad Sweep (parallel)

Scale by tier:

Quick (inline): 1-2 tool calls sequentially. No subagents.

Standard (subagent wave): Dispatch 3-5 parallel subagents with the platform's available delegation primitive:

Subagent A → brave-search + duckduckgo-search for sub-question 1
Subagent B → exa + g-search for sub-question 2
Subagent C → context7 / deepwiki / arxiv / semantic-scholar for technical specifics
Subagent D → wikipedia / wikidata for factual grounding
[Subagent E → PubMed / openalex if academic domain detected]

Deep (agent team): Create a research team with the platform's available team primitive:

Lead: triage (Wave 0), orchestrate, judge reconcile (Wave 3), synthesize (Wave 4)
  |-- web-researcher:       brave-search, duckduckgo-search, ddgs, exa, g-search
  |-- tech-researcher:      context7, deepwiki, arxiv, semantic-scholar, package-version-check-mcp
  |-- content-extractor:    fetcher, trafilatura, docling, wikipedia, wayback
  |-- [academic-researcher: arxiv, semantic-scholar, openalex, crossref, PubMed]
  |-- [adversarial-reviewer: devil's advocate — counter-search all emerging findings]

Spawn academic-researcher if domain signals include academic/scientific. Spawn adversarial-reviewer for Exhaustive tier or if verification complexity >= 2.

Exhaustive: Deep team + each teammate runs nested subagent waves internally when supported; otherwise use serial batches and label the run "degraded orchestration."

Each subagent/teammate returns structured findings:

{
  "sub_question": "...",
  "findings": [{
    "claim": "...",
    "confidence": 0.6,
    "evidence": [{"tool": "brave-search", "url": "https://...", "timestamp": "2026-04-24T12:00:00Z", "excerpt": "..."}],
    "cross_validation": "unknown",
    "source_support": [{"url": "https://...", "support_status": "supports|partial|contradicts|irrelevant", "citation_anchor": "...", "support_note": "..."}],
    "bias_markers": [],
    "gaps": []
  }],
  "leads": ["url1", "url2"],
  "gaps": ["could not find data on X"]
}

Wave 1.5: Perspective Expansion (Deep/Exhaustive only)

STORM-style perspective-guided conversation. Spawn 2-4 perspective subagents:

| Perspective | Focus | Question Style | |-------------|-------|---------------| | Skeptic | What could be wrong? What's missing? | "What evidence would disprove this?" | | Domain Expert | Technical depth, nuance, edge cases | "What do practitioners actually encounter?" | | Practitioner | Real-world applicability, trade-offs | "What matters when you actually build this?" | | Theorist | First principles, abstractions, frameworks | "What underlying model explains this?" |

Each perspective agent reviews Wave 1 findings and generates 2-3 additional sub-questions from their viewpoint. These sub-questions feed into Wave 2.

Wave 2: Deep Dive (parallel, targeted)

1. Rank leads from Wave 1 by potential value (citation frequency, source authority, relevance)
2. Dispatch deep-read subagents — prefer /trafilatura on shell harnesses, else fetcher/trafilatura MCP/docling to extract full content from top leads
3. Follow citation chains — if a source cites another, fetch the original
4. Fill gaps — for each gap identified in Wave 1, dispatch targeted searches
5. Build preliminary claim-to-source support rows for each source-backed finding
6. Use thinking MCPs:

• cascade-thinking for multi-perspective analysis of complex findings
• structured-thinking for tracking evidence chains and contradictions
• think-strategies for complex question decomposition (Standard+ only)

Wave 3: Cross-Validation and Source-Support Audit (parallel)

The anti-hallucination wave. Read references/evidence-chain.md, references/confidence-rubric.md, and references/self-verification.md.

For every claim surviving Waves 1-2:

1. Independence check — are supporting sources truly independent? Sources citing each other are NOT independent.
2. Counter-search — explicitly search for evidence AGAINST each major claim using a different search engine
3. Freshness check — verify sources are current (flag if >1 year old for time-sensitive topics)
4. Contradiction scan — read references/contradiction-protocol.md, identify and classify disagreements
5. Source-support audit — classify each claim/source pair as supports, partial, contradicts, or irrelevant
6. Citation anchor verification — fetch cited URLs when possible and confirm the cited

…

Source & license

This open-source skill is cataloged on AgentStack and links to its original source — we do not rehost the code.

• Author: wyattowalsh
• Source: wyattowalsh/agents
• License: MIT
• Homepage: https://agents.w4w.dev

Install and usage instructions live in the source repository linked above.