research-brieflisted

# Research Brief — Technical Investigation & Recommendation ## What This Skill Does This skill investigates a problem space and produces a **structured research brief** — a document that summarises findings, compares options, makes a concrete recommendation, and identifies open questions. The brief is designed to be consumed by a developer (or by the implementation-spec skill) as the basis for technical decisions. It is not a literature review. The output should be actionable: "here's what I found, here's what I recommend, here's what's still uncertain." ## When to Use This Skill Use when: - The user has a problem or feature and needs to understand the solution landscape - A requirements document exists and the next step is technical investigation - A tracked issue needs research before implementation can begin - The user says "how should I approach this?" or "what are the options?" - Multiple libraries, frameworks, or patterns could solve the problem and the user needs a comparison Do NOT use when: - The user already knows what to build and wants a spec (use implementation-spec) - The decision is between 2-3 known options (use trade-off-analysis — it's faster) - The user wants to brainstorm approaches (use tree-of-thought or graph-of-thought) - The problem is well-understood and just needs implementing (just do it) --- ## Process ### Step 1 — Understand What Needs Researching Identify the research scope from one of these sources: - **A tracked issue** — if the