| name | research-first |
| audience | swarm-plugin |
| description | Apply when planning fixes, investigating tech debt, architecting solutions, or diagnosing unknown issues that may involve external frameworks, dependencies, or platform behavior. Search online for current documentation and state-of-the-art approaches before tracing through code.
|
| context | fork |
| agent | Explore |
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:
- Search current official documentation to confirm the behavior is NOT
intended and NOT already fixed in a newer release
- Search for state-of-the-art solutions, known community workarounds, and
recent discussion of this problem type
- Run multiple searches across distinct sources (official docs, issue
trackers, release notes) rather than trusting the first hit
- 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.
