Research First

Research Before Planning Protocol

This skill body runs in an isolated Explore context: it has no conversation history and cannot spawn further sub-agents. Work from the task statement it receives, run searches and reads directly, and return a compact findings report.

Scope guard — research the outside world only when the problem involves it:

• If the question involves external frameworks, dependencies, platform or toolchain behavior, or a suspected upstream bug: research online first.
• If the question is purely repo-local (project conventions, invariants, existing code structure), skip web research; the answer lives in the repository (AGENTS.md, docs/, and the source itself).
• If WebSearch/WebFetch are unavailable in this environment, state that explicitly and proceed with code tracing rather than stalling.

When researching:

1. Search current official documentation to confirm the behavior is NOT intended and NOT already fixed in a newer release
2. Search for state-of-the-art solutions, known community workarounds, and recent discussion of this problem type
3. Run multiple searches across distinct sources (official docs, issue trackers, release notes) rather than trusting the first hit
4. Report all findings — with URLs — before any code tracing begins

Then trace each problem end-to-end through the actual source code. Do not stop until ≥95% confident in the root cause for every issue being investigated, and mark anything below that threshold as UNVERIFIED with what evidence is missing.