The /research Skill
Quickstart:
npx skills add mattpocock/skills --skill=research
npx skills update research
What it does
research answers a question by reading the sources that own the answer and leaving a cited Markdown file behind. It works only from primary sources — official docs, source code, specs, first-party APIs — never a secondary write-up of them, so what it saves is traceable back to something authoritative rather than a summary of a summary.
When to reach for it
Type /research, or the agent reaches for it automatically when a task turns into reading legwork.
Reach for it when the next step is finding something out — how an API behaves, what a spec actually says, whether a claim holds — and you'd rather not stall your own thread doing the reading. For sharpening a plan by interview instead of by reading, use grilling; for exploring what to build with throwaway code, use prototype.
Delegated legwork
The defining move is that the reading runs as a background agent. You keep working; it goes off, follows each claim back to its primary source, and drops a single cited Markdown file into wherever the repo keeps such notes. Research is legwork you delegate, not thinking you outsource — you get back a document to react to, with its sources attached.
Where it fits
A reach-for-it-anytime standalone that feeds the thinking skills: the file it produces is something to grill, plan, or design against, so it sits upstream of work like grilling and to-prd rather than in the build chain. For the whole map, see ask-matt.