deep-research

Deep Research

Drift-prone skill. Firecrawl/Exa/Tavily MCP tool names, quotas, and result shapes change. Verify the configured MCP tools and current API docs before promising coverage or quoting live source counts. The routing table in references/research_harness/routing.py is the single choke-point to update, and the preflight step catches name/availability drift at runtime.

Produce thorough, cited research reports from multiple sources. The base workflow (understand to plan to search to deep-read to synthesize to deliver) is unchanged; the Research Harness (M-16) below slots routing, caching, source-confidence grading, a cited-report renderer, and a provider preflight into that spine.

This skill is vendored from the ECC deep-research skill and extended with the M-16 harness. The base ECC copy is left untouched.

When to Activate

• User asks to research any topic in depth
• Competitive analysis, technology evaluation, or market sizing
• Due diligence on companies, investors, or technologies
• Any question requiring synthesis from multiple sources
• User says "research", "deep dive", "investigate", or "what's the current state of"

MCP Requirements

At least one search provider. The harness routes across whichever of these are live (see Preflight):

• firecrawl — firecrawl_search, firecrawl_scrape, firecrawl_research_search_github (primary web)
• exa (plugin mcp__plugin_exa_exa__*) — web_search_exa, web_fetch_exa (neural/semantic)

Workflow

Step 1: Understand the Goal

Step 2: Plan the Research

Step 2.5: Preflight (which providers are live)

Step 3: Execute Multi-Source Search (harness-routed)

Step 4: Deep-Read Key Sources

Step 5: Synthesize and Write Report (graded + cited)

[Topic]: Research Report

Executive Summary

1. [First Major Theme]

Key Takeaways