comprehensive-research-agent

# 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...