Provider Research

Run a provider-research sweep: one researcher subagent per service unit, a concise dated report per unit, and a committed branch for every change a researcher is confident about. Everything stays local — this skill publishes nothing. Pushing reports, opening draft PRs on pipecat and filing the digest issue are scripts/provider-watch/publish.py's job, run after the research by whoever invoked it; the run ends by printing the commands. You are the orchestrator; the research itself happens in provider-watch-researcher subagents following RESEARCH_GUIDE.md.

Arguments

/provider-research [--only a,b] [--date YYYY-MM-DD] [--limit N] [--concurrency N]

• --only a,b — providers or unit ids (openai, deepgram/stt). Default: every unit.
• --date YYYY-MM-DD — the run date. Defaults to today; separate runs over disjoint --only slices with the same date compose into one sweep.
• --limit N — research only the first N selected units (deterministic order). For test runs.
• --concurrency N — researchers per batch. Default 6; use 1 for a linear test run.

Examples:

• /provider-research --only deepgram,groq --limit 2 --concurrency 1 — smoke test
• /provider-research --only groq — exercise the branch path; review the branch with the command the report prints

Instructions

Step 1: Resolve paths and prerequisites

1. Parse the arguments. Record RUN_DATE as --date if given, else today's date (YYYY-MM-DD), and PIPECAT_COMMIT as git rev-parse --short HEAD.
2. Pick a scratch directory outside the repo (your session scratchpad if you have one, else mktemp -d -t provider-research). Everything transient — payloads, run.jsonl, worktrees — lives there.
3. Reports checkout: always ./_reports in this repo (gitignored). If it is missing, gh repo clone pipecat-ai/provider-watch-reports _reports; if the clone fails, git init _reports and continue with no history. If it exists and has a remote, git -C _reports pull --ff-only so the run reads current memory.
4. Stop with a clear error if uv run python scripts/provider-watch/inventory.py --md fails.
5. Decision intake: the team records decisions as comments on the digest issues; researchers fold them into each unit's decisions.md in _reports. Collect the comments of the three most recent issues into <scratch>/digest-comments.md:

   gh issue list --repo pipecat-ai/provider-watch-reports --state all --search "Provider watch in:title sort:created-desc" --limit 3 --json number,title,url \
     | jq -r '.[].number' | while read -r n; do
       gh issue view "$n" --repo pipecat-ai/provider-watch-reports --json title,url,comments \
         --jq '"## \(.title) — \(.url)\n" + ([.comments[] | "- \(.author.login) (\(.createdAt | .[:10])) <\(.url)>:\n  \(.body | gsub("\n"; "\n  "))"] | join("\n"))'
     done > <scratch>/digest-comments.md
   

   If the repo or gh is unavailable, write an empty file. Every researcher gets the same file and picks out what concerns its unit.

Step 2: Build the unit list

uv run python scripts/provider-watch/inventory.py --json [--only ...] [--limit N] > <scratch>/units.json

Each entry is one research unit (id like cartesia/tts) with its classes, default model, settings fields, thin-wrapper flag, registry/env/example-bot pointers and docs URL. Do not hand-edit or re-derive this; the researcher gets the entry verbatim.

Step 3: Research in batches

Process units in --concurrency-sized batches, in the order inventory.py emits them. For each unit in a batch, launch one provider-watch-researcher subagent with this payload in the prompt. The agent is defined for Claude Code in .claude/agents/provider-watch-researcher.md (Agent tool, subagent_type: provider-watch-researcher) and for Codex in .codex/agents/provider-watch-researcher.toml (spawn the provider-watch-researcher agent); in an agent without subagents, do the researcher's work yourself, one unit at a time, by following RESEARCH_GUIDE.md with the same payload — the agent definitions are thin shims over that guide.

{
  "unit": <the inventory entry>,
  "run_date": "<RUN_DATE>",
  "pipecat_commit": "<PIPECAT_COMMIT>",
  "repo_root": "<absolute path of this checkout>",
  "reports_path": "<absolute path of ./_reports>",
  "report_path": "reports/<provider>/<unit-suffix>/<RUN_DATE>.md",
  "report_file": "<reports_path>/reports/<provider>/<unit-suffix>/<RUN_DATE>.md",
  "previous_report_file": "<absolute path of the newest existing reports/<provider>/<unit-suffix>/*.md, or null>",
  "decisions_file": "<reports_path>/reports/<provider>/<unit-suffix>/decisions.md",
  "digest_comments_file": "<scratch>/digest-comments.md",
  "scratch_dir": "<scratch>"
}

<unit-suffix> is the part of the unit id after the slash (tts, responses-llm). report_path is the repo-relative path used in frontmatter and links; report_file is where the researcher writes, spelled out absolutely so there is nothing to resolve. The previous report is the newest date-named file in that directory (decisions.md is not a report); pass null on a first run. decisions_file may not exist yet — the researcher creates it when it first records a decision.

Rules for the batch loop:

• Launch the whole batch at once so the subagents run concurrently; wait for all of them before starting the next batch.
• Researchers only produce local artifacts: the report, the unit's decisions.md when a comment or PR state decided something, and at most one committed provider-watch/* branch in a worktree under <scratch>. They never push or open PRs.
• Each researcher returns exactly one JSON line: {"service", "default_model", "prs", "gaps", "error", "summary", "report_path"}. Append it to <scratch>/run.jsonl. If a researcher fails or returns nothing usable, write the report yourself from REPORT_TEMPLATE.md with error set to what happened (no secrets), and append a matching line; a researcher failure never aborts the run.
• If git status in this checkout shows changes you did not make, stop and report it.

Step 4: Clean up and summarize

1. git worktree prune in this checkout and remove <scratch>/wt-* directories. Branches stay; they are the run's output.
2. Print a summary table — unit, default model, branch, changes to consider, error — plus the review command for each branch (git show <branch>).
3. End with the next steps, which belong to the invoker, not to you — print each command together with its explanation below, and never run them:
   • uv run python scripts/provider-watch/publish.py --date <RUN_DATE> — publishes everything on disk for the date: pushes the branches, opens their draft PRs, pushes the reports. Idempotent, so it can run again after further same-date research and only picks up what is new.
   • /provider-research-digest --date <RUN_DATE> — renders _reports/digests/<RUN_DATE>.md from every report carrying the date, topped with authored highlight bullets.
   • uv run python scripts/provider-watch/publish.py --date <RUN_DATE> --finalize — the same publish pass, plus the digest: pushes it and opens (or updates) the digest issue.

Guardrails

• Never print, commit, or paste environment variable values, Authorization headers, or raw API keys — in reports or your output. probe.py redacts; ad-hoc output must be checked by hand.
• This skill publishes nothing: never push, never open PRs or issues, never run publish.py — print its commands instead. Researchers follow the same rule.
• Only scripts/provider-watch/*, RESEARCH_GUIDE.md and REPORT_TEMPLATE.md define what a researcher does; do not improvise extra instructions per unit beyond the payload.