research

# Research Answer one bounded question with current evidence. Research informs a caller; it does not select work, approve a plan, mutate lifecycle state, or decide what happens next. ## Contract 1. State the question, decision it informs, scope, non-goals, and evidence required for a useful answer. 2. Search the smallest relevant local sources. For changing external facts, use current primary sources. 3. Verify structural or semantic-search leads against authoritative content. 4. Separate observation, inference, contradiction, and unknown. 5. Lead with the answer and cite every load-bearing claim. 6. Report unchecked scope and stop. Use the current agent inline by default. Parallel readers or alternate runtimes are optional execution choices only when the caller authorizes them. Prior research, CASS, MS, codebase recon, and pattern mining are advisory sources, not required phases. ## Commit-level citation for code claims A claim about what code does cites the commit it was observed at, plus file:line — code moves, and a citation without a revision decays silently into a claim about a repository that no longer exists. For the working tree, record the current HEAD and whether the cited file carries uncommitted changes. The named failure mode is the floating citation: a path and line that resolved when written, drifted after a refactor, and now lends false authority to a stale answer. A reader must be able to run `git show <commit>:<path>` and see the cited lines; a ...