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docs: link first use of AI Coding Dictionary terms
Every docs page now links the first occurrence of each AI Coding Dictionary term to its entry on aihero.dev. 202 links across 25 pages, one link per term per page. Prose is unchanged — only links added. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
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Claude Opus 5
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## What it does
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`research` answers a question by reading the sources that own the answer, then leaves a cited Markdown file in the repo. It works only from **primary sources** — official docs, source code, specs, first-party APIs — and follows every claim back to the source that owns it, so it will not repeat a blog post's account of an API when the API's own docs are reachable.
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`research` answers a question by reading the sources that own the answer, then leaves a cited Markdown file in the repo. It works only from **[primary sources](https://www.aihero.dev/ai-coding-dictionary/primary-source)** — official docs, source code, specs, first-party APIs — and follows every claim back to the source that owns it, so it will not repeat a blog post's account of an API when the API's own docs are reachable.
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It does not answer you in the conversation. The output is a file, written where the repo already keeps such notes, with a link on each claim. That is the point: a document you can react to, hand to another agent, or throw away, rather than an answer that vanishes when the session ends.
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It does not answer you in the conversation. The output is a file, written where the repo already keeps such notes, with a link on each claim. That is the point: a document you can react to, hand to another agent, or throw away, rather than an answer that vanishes when the [session](https://www.aihero.dev/ai-coding-dictionary/session) ends.
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## When to reach for it
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Type `/research`, or the agent reaches for it automatically when a task turns into reading legwork.
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Type `/research`, or the [agent](https://www.aihero.dev/ai-coding-dictionary/agent) reaches for it automatically when a task turns into reading legwork.
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Reach for it when the next step is *finding something out* from outside the working directory — how a third-party API behaves, what a spec actually says, whether a version claim holds — and you'd rather not stall your own thread doing the reading. What you need decides which skill:
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@@ -18,7 +18,7 @@ Reach for it when the next step is *finding something out* from outside the work
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| To find out whether an approach works in your codebase | [prototype](https://aihero.dev/skills-prototype) |
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| A plan too big to hold in one session | [wayfinder](https://aihero.dev/skills-wayfinder) |
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The line between `research` and `grill-with-docs` is the **shelf life of what comes back**. Research produces short-lived assets — what this library's auth mechanism does as of this week. An ADR records a decision you keep. If what you are producing is a decision rather than a fact, you are grilling, not researching.
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The line between `research` and `grill-with-docs` is the **shelf life of what comes back**. Research produces short-lived assets — what this library's auth mechanism does as of this week. An ADR records a decision you keep. If what you are producing is a decision rather than a fact, you are [grilling](https://www.aihero.dev/ai-coding-dictionary/grilling), not researching.
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## Delegated legwork
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@@ -32,7 +32,7 @@ Where the file lands is decided by the repo, not by the skill: it matches whatev
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**It spawned a second research agent — is that meant to happen?**
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No. This is an open bug, [issue #530](https://github.com/mattpocock/skills/issues/530). The skill tells its caller to spin up a background agent but does not restrict the agent type, so the agent it spawns is a `general-purpose` one that holds the `Agent` tool and the same instructions — and fires them again. One reporter measured a single research task costing roughly 450k tokens across three overlapping runs, with the duplicate finishing half an hour later entirely out of view. It reproduces outside Claude Code too; the same nesting was confirmed in Codex with GPT-5.6-sol. There is no shipped fix. Users have patched their own installed copy with a line telling an agent that is already a subagent to do the work itself, which helps but is instruction-level, not structural. Watch your background task list after invoking, and stop the duplicate.
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No. This is an open bug, [issue #530](https://github.com/mattpocock/skills/issues/530). The skill tells its caller to spin up a background agent but does not restrict the agent type, so the agent it spawns is a `general-purpose` one that holds the `Agent` tool and the same instructions — and fires them again. One reporter measured a single research task costing roughly 450k [tokens](https://www.aihero.dev/ai-coding-dictionary/token) across three overlapping runs, with the duplicate finishing half an hour later entirely out of view. It reproduces outside Claude Code too; the same nesting was confirmed in Codex with GPT-5.6-sol. There is no shipped fix. Users have patched their own installed copy with a line telling an agent that is already a [subagent](https://www.aihero.dev/ai-coding-dictionary/subagent) to do the work itself, which helps but is instruction-level, not structural. Watch your background task list after invoking, and stop the duplicate.
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The opposite failure exists as well: if your own global instructions forbid an agent from re-delegating work, the background agent will politely decline the task and the skill quietly does nothing.
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@@ -42,15 +42,15 @@ The skill puts the file where the repo already keeps notes and does not have an
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**What counts as a "high-trust" primary source, and who decides?**
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The model does. The skill names the *kinds* of source that qualify — official docs, source code, specs, first-party APIs — and there is no allowlist, no domain gate, and no verification pass. This was the loudest objection when the skill was first proposed and it has never been answered publicly: "Five research subagents pointed at junk just gives you five confident wrong answers faster. How are you gating what counts as high-trust sources?" The mitigation you actually have is the citation on each claim. Follow two or three of them. If they land on a summary of the thing rather than the thing, the run failed at its one job.
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The [model](https://www.aihero.dev/ai-coding-dictionary/model) does. The skill names the *kinds* of source that qualify — official docs, source code, specs, first-party APIs — and there is no allowlist, no domain gate, and no verification pass. This was the loudest objection when the skill was first proposed and it has never been answered publicly: "Five research subagents pointed at junk just gives you five confident wrong answers faster. How are you gating what counts as high-trust sources?" The mitigation you actually have is the citation on each claim. Follow two or three of them. If they land on a summary of the thing rather than the thing, the run failed at its one job.
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**Does a later session reuse what an earlier run found?**
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No. Nothing auto-loads a past research file; it is a document sitting in the repo until a human or a skill points at it. This was raised early as the strongest challenge to the design — "the value's the markdown becoming context the agent re-reads later, not the fetch itself. A write-once dead file is just a fancy search" — and the shipped skill does not solve it. In practice the file earns its keep by being fed into the next step deliberately: attach it to a spec, quote it into a grilling session, point a ticket at it.
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No. Nothing auto-loads a past research file; it is a document sitting in the repo until a human or a skill points at it. This was raised early as the strongest challenge to the design — "the value's the markdown becoming context the agent re-reads later, not the fetch itself. A write-once dead file is just a fancy search" — and the shipped skill does not solve it. In practice the file earns its keep by being fed into the next step deliberately: attach it to a spec, quote it into a grilling session, point a [ticket](https://www.aihero.dev/ai-coding-dictionary/ticket) at it.
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**Why not just ask the agent to go read the docs?**
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You can, and Matt did for a long time — his hesitation before shipping this was "I tend to just say that verbatim." Two things the skill buys over the prompt: it runs in the background so your session keeps its context clean, and the primary-source constraint and the cited-file output come out the same way every time rather than however you happened to phrase it. Against a harness's own deep-research mode, the difference is the artifact and the source discipline, not the search. If a two-line prompt gets you what you need on a small question, use the two-line prompt.
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You can, and Matt did for a long time — his hesitation before shipping this was "I tend to just say that verbatim." Two things the skill buys over the prompt: it runs in the background so your session keeps its [context](https://www.aihero.dev/ai-coding-dictionary/context) clean, and the primary-source constraint and the cited-file output come out the same way every time rather than however you happened to phrase it. Against a [harness](https://www.aihero.dev/ai-coding-dictionary/harness)'s own deep-research mode, the difference is the artifact and the source discipline, not the search. If a two-line prompt gets you what you need on a small question, use the two-line prompt.
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**When does it stop reading?**
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@@ -58,7 +58,7 @@ There is no stopping criterion in the skill, and this shows up as two complaints
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**`/wayfinder` created research tickets — do I resolve those myself?**
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No, it now fires them for you. In the unreleased changes since v1.1, a charting session spawns a `/research` subagent per research ticket and burns them down in parallel, capturing findings on a throwaway `research/<name>` branch with a context pointer from the ticket. Research tickets are the one exception to wayfinder's one-ticket-per-session rule, because they are AFK — nothing waits on you. Two known snags with those branches: the subagent has been seen opening a draft PR from a branch that is never meant to merge ([issue #576](https://github.com/mattpocock/skills/issues/576)), and deleting the branch later breaks the context pointers the tickets hold.
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No, it now fires them for you. In the unreleased changes since v1.1, a charting session spawns a `/research` subagent per research ticket and burns them down in parallel, capturing findings on a throwaway `research/<name>` branch with a [context pointer](https://www.aihero.dev/ai-coding-dictionary/context-pointer) from the ticket. Research tickets are the one exception to wayfinder's one-ticket-per-session rule, because they are [AFK](https://www.aihero.dev/ai-coding-dictionary/afk) — nothing waits on you. Two known snags with those branches: the subagent has been seen opening a draft PR from a branch that is never meant to merge ([issue #576](https://github.com/mattpocock/skills/issues/576)), and deleting the branch later breaks the context pointers the tickets hold.
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## It's working if
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