Research Brief

This is a Hermes-native research-brief workflow skill.

Why This Exists

research-brief exists to keep research work explicit, evidence-backed, and inside the Hermes/executor boundary instead of relying on ad hoc chat narration.

Do Not Use When

• The request is only fresh links, citations, or current facts without a business question or decision audience; use research.
• Sources have not yet been selected and the user wants source types, candidates, or acquisition state; use source-finder.

Examples

Good example:

• Prompt: research-brief: compare three onboarding analytics vendors using customer notes and confidence gaps.
• Expected behavior: Prepare a source-backed brief with evidence, inference, confidence, and retrieval gaps separated.
• Why: The user needs business research synthesis, not recurring operations or coding.

Bad example:

• Prompt: research-brief: treat casual chat or unaccepted work as if this workflow already produced verified results.
• Expected behavior: Ask a clarification question or route to a narrower workflow instead of forcing research-brief.
• Why: The request lacks the required inputs or would overclaim work that Hermes did not observe.

Completion Checklist

• The research question, source boundaries, recency assumptions, and confidence level are named.
• Observed sources, inference, synthesis, and unresolved retrieval gaps are separated.
• Follow-up planning or handoff uses the research summary without calling it execution evidence.

Recovery Notes

• If sources cannot be accessed, state the retrieval gap and use only observed local context.
• If evidence is thin or one-sided, lower confidence and ask for a narrower source boundary.

Workflow Lane

• Current lane: Research and company ops (source-finder, research, best-practice-research, autoresearch-goal, research-brief, strategy-brief, feedback-triage, research-department, +13 more) - research, signals, ops, and briefings.
• If intent belongs to another lane, hand back to oh-my-hermes or name the adjacent workflow.
• Shared product, routing, compatibility, and evidence rules: omh-routing/references/skill-common-rail.md.

Use When

Use when Hermes should scope a business question, gather or summarize source-backed evidence, and preserve evidence/inference boundaries before strategy or handoff.

Strong routing signals: research-brief, business-research, business research, research brief, decision brief, pricing decision brief, decision-ready brief, source-backed business research, customer feedback trends, feedback trends, market evidence, data search, source scan, 자료 조사, 데이터 서치, 근거 조사, 피드백 추세, 고객 피드백 추세

Catalog Metadata

Category: research Phase: business-brief Hermes role: researcher Quality tier: source-gated Reasoning demand: standard

Quality bar:

• State the research question, source boundaries, and recency assumptions before synthesis.
• Record each material claim as a compact evidence row: claim, source, source class (upstream official, practitioner heuristic, or unattributed), source date, confidence, and unresolved conflict.
• Keep claims that lack corroboration in an explicit unresolved list instead of asserting or silently dropping them.
• Separate observed sources, source quality, source diversity, inferred trends, and unresolved uncertainty.
• Use the brief to feed strategy or meeting work without calling it execution evidence.

Handoff policy:

Keep business research in Hermes; prepare a selected executor/runtime handoff only after a later accepted plan requires code changes.

Required inputs:

• business question
• source boundary
• recency or market scope

Expected outputs:

• evidence table
• inference summary
• confidence and uncertainty

Artifact expectations:

• research brief or source ledger when the wrapper captures observed sources

Safety rules:

• Do not claim sources were fetched unless Hermes or the wrapper observed them.
• Separate evidence, inference, confidence, source diversity, and missing-source gaps.
• Route later implementation separately through an accepted plan and coding handoff.

Runtime Evidence

Preferred harness for this skill: business-research.

sh
omh runtime record --skill research-brief --harness business-research --status started

Record observed delegation results; otherwise return not_available or not_observed. Prepared OMH routing is not execution, review, CI, merge-readiness, or merge evidence.

• Treat wrapper memory/context summaries as advisory local context, not proof of opaque Hermes memory reads or changes.

Preserve workflow intent and stop conditions; verify before claiming completion.

Use Hermes-native subagent/delegation features when available: native subagents -> Hermes delegation when available, otherwise sequential lanes.

Shared product, compatibility, topology, memory, harness, and execution rules: omh-routing/references/skill-common-rail.md. Load it when applicable; otherwise name an unavailable capability.