research
Conduct comprehensive academic research using OpenAlex, PDF extraction, paper search MCPs, and web search. Always produces comprehensive reports with 5+ evidence cards covering conflicting ideas and best approaches. Integrates academic papers (high weight) and non-academic sources (blogs, docs - lower weight but valuable for SOTA). Use when: (1) Researching software architecture patterns, (2) Finding academic papers on technical topics, (3) Conducting literature reviews, (4) Analyzing research papers for evidence-based decisions, (5) Building evidence cards from papers, (6) Finding related works and citations, or (7) When you need grounded, paper-backed technical recommendations. Triggers: research, find papers, literature review, evidence-based, academic research, compare approaches, what does research say, find studies on, search for papers about.
analyzing-research-documents
Extracts high-value insights from research documents, RCAs, design docs, and memos - filters aggressively to return only actionable information. Research equivalent of analyzing-implementations skill.
content-research
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content-research-writer
Assists in writing high-quality content by conducting research, adding citations, improving hooks, iterating on outlines, and providing real-time feedback on each section. Transforms your writing process from solo effort to collaborative partnership.
synthesis-and-analogy
Use when synthesizing information from multiple sources (literature review, stakeholder feedback, research findings, data from different systems), creating or evaluating analogies for explanation or problem-solving (cross-domain transfer, "X is like Y", structural mapping), combining conflicting viewpoints into unified framework, identifying patterns across disparate sources, finding creative solutions by transferring principles from one domain to another, testing whether analogies hold (surface vs deep similarities), or when user mentions "synthesize", "combine sources", "analogy", "like", "similar to", "transfer from", "integrate findings", "what's it analogous to".
researching
Comprehensive research with cited sources. Use for complex research that should be verified and persist.
research
Research libraries, APIs, and patterns using searchGitHub and Exa tools. Finds real-world implementations and saves structured reports to docs/research/. Use when investigating technologies, debugging issues, or comparing options.
