dmmulroy Spin up a background agent to do the research, so you keep working while it reads.
Recursion guard
Before spawning, check RESEARCH_SUBAGENT:
- If
RESEARCH_SUBAGENT=1, this pane is already the delegated researcher. Do not spawn any agent or pane. Perform the research and write the report directly. - Otherwise, create one background pane with
herdr pane split ... --env RESEARCH_SUBAGENT=1, and explicitly tell that agent not to delegate or spawn subagents.
Never create a second research agent as a retry. If the delegated agent stalls or fails, stop/close it and complete the research in the original pane.
The background agent's 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.