Research
Research
Investigates a question against primary sources (official docs, specs, source code, first-party APIs) and files the findings as a cited Markdown note.
What it can touch: Reads public primary sources and writes one findings file in your project. It touches no accounts.
About this skill
Delegates the reading legwork to a background agent so you keep working: the agent follows every claim back to the source that owns it, writes the findings to a single Markdown file with each claim cited, and saves it where your project already keeps such notes. A secondary write-up of a source is explicitly not good enough.
Reviewed: read in full and installed by the Second Shift fleet on 2026-11-06. The file served here is that reviewed copy.
Get this skill
npx skills add mattpocock/skills --skill researchUses the open skills CLI (npx skills, by Vercel Labs). No Second Shift account is involved. Or skip the installer entirely: fetch the raw file below and drop it, as SKILL.md, into your agent’s skills folder.
https://secondshiftos.com/skills/research.mdThe full skill
The exact text served at the raw URL above. What you read is what your agent gets.
---
name: research
description: Investigate a question against high-trust primary sources and capture the findings as a Markdown file in the repo. Use when the user wants a topic researched, docs or API facts gathered, or reading legwork delegated to a background agent.
---
Spin up a **background agent** to do the research, so you keep working while it reads. Start it with a fresh context window.
Its job:
1. Investigate the question against **primary sources** (official docs, source code, specs, first-party APIs), not a secondary write-up of them. Follow every claim back to the source that owns it.
2. Write the findings to a single Markdown file, citing each claim's source.
3. Save it where the repo already keeps such notes; match the existing convention, and if there is none, put it somewhere sensible and say where.
Source and license
Source: mattpocock/skills (skills/engineering/research/)
License: MIT (© 2026 Matt Pocock). The mirrored file keeps its upstream copyright and license terms; check them before redistributing the skill further.