Code Research

When researching code, follow the tool escalation ladder:

1. Local first - For pure code lookup, invoke code-search skill first; otherwise use Grep/Glob/Read
2. Terminal research - Use fast CLI tools (w3m/lynx, curl, jq, rg, fd, gh) and DDG bangs
3. Built-in web - Use WebSearch/WebFetch for documentation and articles
4. Skills & Scripts - Use gh-cli skill for GitHub, scripts for Stack Overflow
5. MCP servers - Use Exa/Deepwiki/Chrome for complex research needs

Start simple. Escalate only when simpler tools fail.

Web research:

• WebSearch - General web search for docs, tutorials, discussions
• WebFetch - Fetch and analyze specific URLs (works for most static sites)

When to use: Always start here. These tools are fast, low-cost, and handle 80% of research tasks.

Fallback to POSIX tools:

• grep, find, sed, awk, cut, sort, uniq

Terminal web/doc workflows:

• w3m / lynx for fast doc browsing
• DuckDuckGo bangs (!gh, !so, !npm, !pypi) to jump directly to sources
• curl + jq + rg for structured data and targeted extraction
• pup/htmlq/python -m bs4 for HTML parsing when needed
• readability-lxml (or python -m readability) to clean article content
• csvkit / xsv for CSV docs and tables
• fzf to interactively select snippets and URLs
• Clipboard handoff: pbcopy (macOS) / xclip -selection clipboard (Linux)

Rate-limit hygiene:

• curl --retry 3 --retry-delay 2 --compressed + backoff (sleep)
• Use ETag/If-Modified-Since to avoid refetching unchanged docs

When to use: Quick web/CLI research before WebSearch, or when you need high-throughput data extraction.

GitHub CLI (gh) - Use the gh-cli skill for comprehensive GitHub operations:

• Repository info, issues, PRs, code search, Actions, releases, and more
• Invoke with: Skill: gh-cli

stackoverflow-api.sh - Find solutions to errors

# Search Stack Overflow for solutions
${AGENT_ROOT}/skills/code-research/scripts/stackoverflow-api.sh "error message or question"

When to use: When you need structured GitHub data (issues, PRs, code across repos) that WebSearch can't provide cleanly.

Exa MCP - Semantic web search with AI understanding

• Use for: Finding related libraries, discovering best practices, semantic similarity search
• Better than WebSearch when you need conceptual matches, not keyword matches

Deepwiki MCP - Documentation and wiki content

• Use for: Library documentation, API references, technical wikis
• Better than WebFetch for structured documentation extraction

Chrome Web Tools MCP - Headless browser automation

• Use for: JavaScript-heavy sites, sites requiring authentication, dynamic content
• Example: Navigating https://codewiki.google/github.com/anomalyco/opencode

When to use: When simpler tools fail—JS-rendered content, semantic search needs, or complex documentation sites.

Find relevant files

Glob: **/{keyword}.{ts,py,go}

Search for patterns

Grep: "functionName|className|errorMessage"

Deep exploration

Task(subagent_type=Explore): "Find how authentication is implemented"

</step>

<step name="2.5" label="Terminal Research">
Use fast terminal tools to browse docs and extract data:

Quick doc browsing

w3m https://docs.example.com/guide

DDG bangs

WebSearch: "!gh repo:org/project authentication middleware"

Fast extraction

curl -s https://docs.example.com/api | rg -n "endpoint" | sed -n '1,120p'

Structured GitHub data via gh

gh repo view org/repo --json description --jq '.description'

Clean article text

curl -s https://blog.example.com/post | python -m readability | rg -n "API" | sed -n '1,80p'

CSV extraction

curl -s https://docs.example.com/table.csv | xsv select 1,3 | xsv table | sed -n '1,40p'

Interactive selection

curl -s https://docs.example.com/api | rg -n "endpoint" | fzf

Clipboard handoff

curl -s https://docs.example.com/api | pbcopy # or: xclip -selection clipboard

Prefer Rust utilities when available (rg/fd/bat/sd/xsv); fall back to standard Unix tools otherwise.
</step>

<step name="3" label="Expand to Web">
If local exploration isn't enough:

General search

WebSearch: "library-name how to implement X"

Fetch specific docs

WebFetch: "https://docs.library.com/guide"

</step>

<step name="4" label="Use Skills & Scripts for Structured Data">
When you need GitHub/StackOverflow data:

GitHub operations - invoke the gh-cli skill

Skill: gh-cli

Then use gh directly, e.g.:

gh issue list -R facebook/react --search "useEffect cleanup" gh search code "useEffect cleanup" --repo facebook/react

```bash
# Find error solutions
${AGENT_ROOT}/skills/code-research/scripts/stackoverflow-api.sh "React useEffect memory leak"

Semantic search (Exa)

mcp__web_search_exa: "best practices for React state management 2024" mcp__get_code_context_exa: "langgraph deepagent cli" mcp__crawling_exa: "https://codewiki.google/github.com/anomalyco/opencode"

Documentation extraction (Deepwiki)

mcp__deepwiki__read_wiki_contents: "react/react" mcp__deepwiki__read_wiki_structure: "anomalyco/opencode" mcp__deepwiki__ask_question: "What are the context engineering strategies used by anomalyco/opencode?"

Website Navigation

Use chrome-devtools-mcp to open up webpages and crawl through them for deeper information extraction tasks.

</step>

<step name="6" label="Save High-Value Sources to Readwise">
When a source is highly relevant (authoritative docs, key blog posts, insightful discussions), persist it for future retrieval:
```bash
# Save a URL to Reader with research tags
readwise reader-create-document --url "https://..." --tags "code-research,<topic>"

# Create a highlight for a key finding or quote
readwise readwise-create-highlights --highlights '[{"text": "key finding text", "title": "Source Title", "source_url": "https://...", "note": "Why this matters"}]'

Only save sources scoring 2-3 on relevance (directly answers the question or provides strong supporting context). Do not save noise.

Quick answer - For simple questions, respond inline with sources Structured summary - For broader research:

## Findings
- Key finding 1
- Key finding 2

## Recommendations
- Recommended approach with rationale

## Sources
- [Source 1](url)
- [Source 2](url)

Research report - For deep dives, create a markdown file:

Write: research-{topic}-{date}.md