investigative-report

name	investigative-report
description	Use when turning raw material — research, notes, interview answers, fragments, or investigation findings — into a sourced written report or article, or when shaping, drafting, restructuring, or tightening such a draft. Triggers: "write up the findings", "investigative report", "turn these notes into an article", "draft the report", "shape this into an article", "edit the article", "help me write this up".
triggers	["investigative report","write up the findings","turn these notes into an article","draft the report","shape this into an article","edit the article"]
category	writing
token_efficiency	high
dependencies	[]

Investigative Report

Overview

Turn gathered material into a written case. Every claim is provenance-backed, and the citation gate is tiered — hard for findings, soft for color. The report is the investigation board, rendered linearly. One disciplined pass replaces the old fragments → shape → beats → edit pipeline.

When to use

• Raw input (notes, interview answers, research, findings) must become a report or article.
• A draft needs shaping, structuring, or tightening.
• Claims must be sourced and attributable — not a casual prose dump.

Not for: throwaway writing with no sourcing needs, or a single quick paragraph.

The five phases

1. Gather — mine the user first, then web-research to corroborate and extend. Every fragment becomes a board node carrying source / method / confidence / verify. Never flatten user input and web research into one undifferentiated pile — each keeps its origin.
2. Shape — find the through-line; state it back; revise on the user's response. The thesis may rest only on hard-tier (verified) findings.
3. Structure — default: marshal the findings into an argument for the thesis (red string = the logical spine). Optional beats mode: assemble as a narrative journey.
4. Edit — tighten, restructure, cut.
5. Cite — classify every claim by tier, enforce the gate, render provenance.

The citation gate

kind	Tier	Gate
finding	hard	must be verified, else demote to color or cut
hypothesis · question	soft	render with confidence flag
color / vignette / inference	soft	render with confidence flag

The thesis rests only on hard-tier findings. A would-be finding that isn't verified is demoted to a hedged color statement or cut — never stated as fact.

Render convention

Every claim ends with ^[<source> · <confidence>]; verify is the expandable citation. Hard reads clean (gate guarantees verified). Soft shows corroborated (amber) or unverified (red). Standalone color goes in a > field note blockquote, confidence-tagged.

Provenance

Reads the board and the provenance record (BOARD.md, spiffe-provenance.md): verify → citation, confidence → tier eligibility, source → attribution. Nothing appears in the report that isn't already a node on the board.

Boundaries

Independent skill. It does not investigate (that's investigate) and does not interrogate specs (interrogate-spec). It produces writing only. The QUESTION.md voice is flavor, never a hard dependency — the skill works without it.

Red flags — STOP

• About to state an unverified claim as fact → demote to color or cut.
• "This color is basically a finding" → if it isn't verified, it's color.
• "The thesis is close enough on corroborated evidence" → the thesis needs verified findings.
• Merging user and web fragments "for flow" → each fragment keeps its source.

All of these mean: respect the tier. The gate is the difference between a report and an opinion piece.