Research

Investigate a question against high-trust primary sources and capture the findings as a Markdown file in the repo.

1 minute · 89 words

Spin up a background agent to do the research, so you keep working while it reads.

Its job:

Investigate the question against primary sources — official docs, source code, specs, first-party APIs — not a secondary write-up of them. Follow every claim back to the source that owns it.
Write the findings to a single Markdown file, citing each claim’s source.
Save it where the repo already keeps such notes; match the existing convention, and if there is none, put it somewhere sensible and say where.

Install this repository

$ npx skills add mattpocock/skills

» /plugin marketplace add mattpocock/skills

Skills install per repository, not per chapter — the CLI has no documented per-skill form, so we do not print one.

About this skill

Trigger

Investigate a question against high-trust primary sources and capture the findings as a Markdown file in the repo. Use when the user wants a topic researched, docs or API facts gathered, or reading legwork delegated to a background agent.

The verbatim description from this skill’s front matter — the string an agent matches on to decide whether to load it.

Colophon for this issue

Colophon

How this issue was made

Source: github.com/mattpocock/skills, branch main, last pushed 7 August 2026.
Licence: MIT — the text of every chapter is reproduced unmodified, frontmatter included, under the upstream licence.
Discovery: 35 chapters found by walking the repository tree for SKILL.md, not by matching a directory convention. 4 distinct layouts observed: skills/engineering/*/SKILL.md, skills/in-progress/*/SKILL.md, skills/misc/*/SKILL.md, skills/productivity/*/SKILL.md.
Issue colours: Resolved from a curated brand profile — hue 253°, chroma 0.140. Two accent tones are generated per issue and each is proven against its own ground before it ships: a single accent that passes AA on both light and dark paper is arithmetically impossible.
Heading repairs: None needed in this chapter: the outline was already valid.
Spec compliance: Every chapter satisfies the Agent Skills specification’s frontmatter rules.
Images: Images inside a chapter come from the upstream repository. Where the author gave no alternative text we mark the image decorative rather than inventing a description — a plausible caption we made up is worse than none for the reader who depends on it.
Marketplace: A plugin manifest is published at .claude-plugin/marketplace.json by Matt Pocock, declaring 1 plugin. It is read for editorial metadata only — never as the skill index, which is always the repository tree.
Signal: Install counts come from skills.sh. They measure downloads, not quality, and an unranked repository is not an unread one.
Agent surfaces: The whole issue is available as one markdown document at /mattpocock/skills.md, and each chapter at its own .md URL.
Publication: Set by Skills Docs from the source repository. Body text is Literata at the reader’s chosen size and measure; code is Geist Mono. Nothing on this page was written by us except this paragraph.

Research

About this skill

Trigger

Colophon

Research

Appendix 10.1

Also bundledYAML · 1 file

About this skill

Trigger

Colophon

Appendix 10.1

Also bundledYAML · 1 file