Amey-Thakur Deep research
Deep research is the full loop from a hard question to a trustworthy, cited answer: plan the investigation, gather from many sources, verify what you find, and synthesize it into something more than the sum of the pages. It is the method an agent (or a person) follows to research autonomously without cutting corners.
Method
- Plan before searching. Sharpen the question, decompose it into answerable sub-questions, and decide what evidence would settle each and where it lives (see research-planning). A deep investigation without a plan becomes a pile of tangents.
- Search broadly, from multiple angles. Cover each sub-question from several search angles and source types, so you are not captured by the first framing or the most popular result (see web-research). Cast wide first (find the landscape, the key sources, the disagreements), then go deep on what matters. Deliberately seek disconfirming evidence and the strongest opposing view, not just support.
- Go deep on primary sources. Read the actual papers, docs, data, and original statements for the load-bearing claims, not summaries of them (see reading-papers, source-evaluation). The depth that distinguishes deep research is following claims to their origin and understanding them, not skimming aggregators.
- Verify as you go. Evaluate every source and corroborate every important claim across independent origins before it enters your conclusion (see source-evaluation, fact-checking). Do not let an unverified claim propagate into the synthesis; mark what is confirmed, what is contested, and what is unknown.
- Synthesize, do not just collect. The value is in connecting the findings: reconciling or surfacing the disagreements between sources, noting the consensus and the outliers, and answering the actual question rather than dumping what you found (see research-synthesis). A list of quotes is not research; the reasoned answer that accounts for them is.
- Deliver with citations and honest confidence. Present the answer with its sources so it can be checked, distinguish well-supported conclusions from tentative ones, and state the open questions and what would resolve them (see writing-with-evidence). Know when to stop: when new sources stop changing the answer (saturation) or the decision is adequately supported.
Boundaries
- Deep research is expensive; reserve it for questions whose stakes justify it. Most questions need a quick lookup and a source check, not the full loop (see research-planning's depth budget).
- Thoroughness is not the appearance of it: many low-quality sources are not depth, and a long report is not a good one. Depth is verified primary evidence and real synthesis, not volume (see the completeness-vs-padding tension in research-synthesis).
- For an autonomous agent, the loop must include verification and grounding at every step; an agent that searches and synthesizes without fact-checking confidently launders errors into a citation-shaped answer (see fact-checking, llm-guardrails).