agentic-research-operations

name	agentic-research-operations
description	Use when designing, running, or auditing multi-agent research operations: wave planning, task briefs, agent roles, tool boundaries, verification loops, failure recovery, evaluation, and portable runtime behavior across Codex, Claude, and other agents.
metadata	{"portable":true,"compatible_with":["claude-code","codex"]}

Agentic Research Operations

Use When

• Use when a project dispatches multiple research agents, verification agents, synthesis agents, or code agents.
• Use when building or changing orchestration, agent prompts, runtime portability, or evaluation gates.
• Use when a research workflow must be reproducible, auditable, and resilient to agent drift.

Do Not Use When

• A single local edit or fact-check needs no orchestration.
• The user explicitly asks not to delegate or parallelize.

Required Inputs

• Research goal, cohorts, source classes, outputs, risks, tools, time horizon, and verification standard.
• Current project context and any prior wave outputs.
• The hard evidence-discipline boilerplate for every sub-agent prompt.

Workflow

1. Decide whether agents help: split only independent work with clear boundaries and verifiable outputs.
2. Define roles: researcher, verifier, gap analyst, red-team reviewer, synthesizer, renderer, or code worker.
3. Write briefs with goal, scope, out-of-scope, source classes, deliverable, storage path, and hard constraints.
4. Assign disjoint ownership: cohorts, files, source classes, or verification questions.
5. Require structured outputs: findings, sources, gaps, confidence, and next actions.
6. Verify before merge: source liveness, quote checks, contradiction scan, and claim graph update.
7. Keep cross-cohort synthesis with the orchestrator unless a task is explicitly a bounded synthesis subproblem.
8. Record operational lessons in project status or evidence audit.

Quality Standards

• Delegated tasks are independent, bounded, and material to the outcome.
• Agents receive enough context to avoid duplicate work but not so much that verification independence is lost.
• Every agent output has a merge criterion and rejection criterion.
• Tool access is least-privilege for the task.
• Verification is a separate pass, not trust in a polished answer.

Anti-Patterns

• Delegating the critical path when the orchestrator is blocked on it.
• Multiple agents researching the same broad question without cohort boundaries.
• Asking a research agent to synthesize across cohorts it cannot see.
• Accepting sub-agent citations without verification.
• Hiding failures instead of logging them.

Outputs

• Agent wave plan.
• Standard brief.
• Verification checklist.
• Merge/reject decision.
• Operations lesson log.

Evidence Produced

Category	Artifact	Format	Example
Operability	Wave plan	Markdown table	Agent, cohort, scope, output, verification
Release evidence	Merge record	Markdown table	Agent output accepted/rejected with reason

References

• Load references/agent-brief-template.md before dispatching agents.
• Load references/agent-evaluation-loop.md when accepting, rejecting, or improving agent outputs.

Companion Skills

• research-orchestration supplies research wave structure.
• source-evaluation supplies mandatory evidence constraints.
• evidence-claim-graph supplies merge substrate.
• skill-writing applies when agent operations are encoded into skills.