Comprehensive Research Agent Best Practices

This skill addresses common failures in multi-step research tasks: unhandled tool errors, missing validation, opaque reasoning, and premature conclusions. It provides structured protocols for source validation, error recovery, and thinking transparency that significantly improves research quality and reliability.

When to Activate

• Task involves web research with search, read_url, or fetch operations
• Task requires gathering information from multiple sources
• Task has explicit requirements for completeness or verification
• Task includes file operations that need validation (save, write, read)
• Any research or information-gathering workflow with 3+ tool interactions

Core Concepts

• Validation Checkpoints: Explicit verification steps at phase transitions to confirm tool outputs, source relevance, and information completeness before proceeding
• Error Recovery Protocols: Mandatory acknowledgment and handling of tool failures with fallback strategies rather than silent continuation
• Source Traceability: Maintaining clear tracking of which sources were actually retrieved vs. referenced from prior knowledge to prevent hallucination
• Substantive Thinking Blocks: Detailed reasoning traces that document insights, connections, gaps, and decision rationale at each step
• Cross-Source Validation: Verifying key claims against multiple sources and explicitly noting consensus, contradictions, and information gaps

Patterns to Avoid