research — external knowledge → §R

Every finding cites a source. No source → flag it ?, never write a guess as fact.

"Process without library context gives you well-organized hallucinations." Build invents a plausible-but-wrong API & §B fills with avoidable bugs. Research is the external oracle: pull the real fact once, log it caveman, never re-derive.

WHEN TO RESEARCH

• A §C/§I/§V decision hinges on a lib, API, version, or pattern you are unsure of.
• You are about to assume how an external dependency behaves.
• The idea touches a domain with real prior art (auth, payments, crypto, rate-limit).
• /grill parked a ? that the outside world must answer.

Skip when the build touches only code you already wrote. Research scales to the unknown, ⊥ to habit.

FOUR STEPS

1. SCOPE

Turn the unknown into 1-3 concrete questions. Vague "research auth" → "JWT lib for Node ESM, maintained?" + "refresh-token rotation: current best practice?". A scoped question gets a citable answer; a vague one gets an essay.

2. GATHER

Use web search / docs tools. Prefer primary sources: official docs, the repo, the RFC, the paper. Two independent sources beat one confident blog. For a big sweep, spawn a sub-agent so the raw pages never touch this context — it returns only the distilled finding + source.

3. DISTILL

Crush each answer to one caveman line + its source. Drop the prose. The §R row is the memory; the tab you read is not.

> R3|refresh token|rotate on use, revoke family on reuse-detect|datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc6819#section-5.2.2.3

4. HAND OFF

Emit the §R rows & hand to the spec skill to append. If a finding changes a constraint or interface, note the §C/§I edit for spec too. Research proposes; spec writes.

SOURCE DISCIPLINE

• Cite a URL, repo, RFC, or paper per row. Verbatim identifiers/versions.
• Could not verify → write the row but flag ? in the finding & say so. An

unverified claim labeled honestly is fine; one disguised as fact is a future §B.

• Conflicting sources → log both, let the user pick. ⊥ silently average them.

WHEN TO STOP

Done when every scoped question has a sourced §R row (or an honest ?), and no build decision still rests on an unchecked assumption. ⊥ research past the questions you scoped — that is just burning the attention budget.

BOUNDARIES

• ⊥ write SPEC.md. Hand §R rows to spec.
• ⊥ write a finding as fact without a source.
• ⊥ dump raw pages into context or §R. Distill or it does not land.
• ⊥ research what you can read in the repo. Local truth > web guess.