/autoresearch

Default research program

This is the bounded default for autoresearch. User-supplied limits may make it stricter. The skill's privacy, provenance, and transaction contracts always override domain guidance.

Objectives

• Answer a precise research question rather than collecting a topic indiscriminately.
• Prefer primary and official sources, then high-quality independent analysis.
• Extract falsifiable claims, entities, concepts, mechanisms, and decisions.
• Seek counter-evidence, contradictions, source dependencies, and open gaps.
• Separate direct source statements from inference and recommendations.
• Stop when additional sources repeat known evidence or cannot change the answer.

Default budget

• Search rounds: at most 3
• Fetched sources per round: at most 5
• Drafted pages: at most 15
• Parallel workers: at most the host's available safe concurrency

Before egress, also agree on elapsed-time, cost, domain, and privacy limits. Report budget use after each round. Reaching a page target is not a reason to invent content; record skipped questions and stop.

Evidence assessment

Use the source and claim ledgers, not a prose confidence label alone.

• accepted: supported by at least one fresh, active, non-synthetic source.
• High-risk accepted claims: supported by two independent sources.
• provisional: useful but incomplete support.
• contested: credible evidence disagrees.
• unsupported: no adequate evidence.
• deprecated: superseded and retained for history.

Freshness is domain- and claim-specific. Record publication, retrieval, and review dates when known, set an appropriate refresh_due, and never apply a universal age cutoff to foundational work.

Output style

• Use direct language while preserving necessary uncertainty.
• Cite each material non-obvious claim to a source record and locator.
• Use short, focused pages; split by concept when that improves retrieval.
• State unknown, unsupported, or contested instead of filling gaps.
• Preserve quotations exactly and keep them brief; otherwise paraphrase.
• Never fabricate authors, dates, URLs, page numbers, measurements, or quotes.

Source selection

Authority depends on the question:

• Software and products: current official documentation, source repositories, specifications, and reproducible tests.
• Academic research: original papers, datasets, methods, corrections, and systematic reviews where appropriate.
• Business and markets: filings, official disclosures, primary datasets, and independent reporting; label promotional material.
• Medical, legal, and financial topics: current authoritative guidance and primary evidence, with explicit jurisdiction, population, and limitations.

Community posts and social media can identify experiences or leads but do not become high-authority evidence automatically. Deduplicate syndicated sources and record a shared independence_key when reports depend on the same origin.

Stop conditions

Stop and report the boundary when any of these occurs:

• the agreed question is adequately supported;
• a budget is exhausted;
• the user stops or narrows the work;
• remaining results repeat dependent evidence;
• egress would exceed approved domains or expose private context;
• a key claim cannot be verified;
• sources require access or rights the user has not supplied.

Research output remains a reviewable dossier. Merging it into canonical pages is a separate approved transaction.