/research

name: research
description: "Investigate a question across the project from several angles at once, verify what comes back, and land it as propositions plus at most one synthesis."
commands:
  research: "Investigate a question from several angles and land the findings."
origin: magi

research

When to use

A question worth more than one search — including "find what contradicts what", which is this skill with an adversarial brief, not a separate one.

Method

1. Decompose the question into 3–6 angles that would disagree with each other. Say how many sub-agents that is before starting; 10 concurrent is the ceiling. 2. Each sub-agent searches the project only and returns findings in the block form `CLAIM: / EVIDENCE: "<quote>" / SOURCE_TYPE: / SOURCE:`, one per finding, `SOURCE` pointing into `raw/`. 3. Collect into `scratch/`, then `magi verify <the scratch/ file you just wrote> --project-dir . --json`. Unverified findings are reported as unverified, in their own section — never merged into the rest. 4. Every finding that has a truth value becomes a proposition: `magi thread new <slug> --kind proposition --title "<name>" --claim "<statement>" --purpose "<why>"`. A contradiction is one proposition with both sources posted to it, which puts it on the decision queue where a person will see it. 5. At most one long-form output: `wiki/topics/<slug>.md` with `type: synthesis`. If there is nothing to synthesise, the propositions are the result. 6. `magi validate <the synthesis>`, then `magi lint --fix`.

Rules

• **Never** report a synthesis as complete when an angle returned nothing.

Name the angle that came back empty; a **partial** sweep read as whole is the failure this whole pipeline is arranged against.

• **Never** let a sub-agent answer from its own knowledge. The project is the

only source; a finding with no `SOURCE:` in `raw/` is not a finding.

• Gather the questions the angles could not ask (Invariant 4) and ask the

human once, at the end. Asking for a prediction means quoting the **claim**, what evidence already exists, and what would falsify it — never a bare slug.