Merge pull request #538 from mattpocock/wayfinder/research-subagents

wayfinder: burn research tickets down with subagents

skills/engineering/wayfinder/SKILL.md

@@ -74,7 +74,7 @@ The answer isn't part of the body — it's recorded on resolution (see [Work thr
 
 Every ticket is either **HITL** — human in the loop, worked *with* a human who speaks for themselves — or **AFK**, driven by the agent alone. A HITL ticket only resolves through that live exchange; the agent never stands in for the human's side of it (a grilling agent that answers its own questions has broken this).
 
-- **Research** (AFK): Reading documentation, third-party APIs, or local resources like knowledge bases. Creates a markdown summary as a linked asset. Use when knowledge outside the current working directory is required.
+- **Research** (AFK): Reading documentation, third-party APIs, or local resources like knowledge bases to surface a fact a decision waits on. Resolved by a `/research` **subagent**. Use when knowledge outside the current working directory is required.
 - **Prototype** (HITL): Raise the fidelity of the discussion by making a cheap, rough, concrete artifact to react to — an outline, a rough take, a stub, or UI/logic code via the /prototype skill. Links the prototype as an asset. Use when "how should it look" or "how should it behave" is the key question.
 - **Grilling** (HITL): Conversation via the /grilling and /domain-modeling skills, one question at a time. The default case.
 - **Task** (HITL or AFK): Manual work that must happen before a *decision* can be made — nothing to decide, prototype, or research, but the discussion is blocked until it's done. Signing up for a service so its API can be judged, provisioning access, moving data so its shape can be seen. This is the one type that *does* rather than decides — and it earns its place by unblocking a decision, not by delivering the destination. The agent drives it alone where it can (AFK); otherwise it hands the human a precise checklist (HITL). Resolved when the work is done; the answer records what was done and any resulting facts (credentials location, new URLs, row counts) later tickets depend on.
@@ -102,7 +102,7 @@ Ruling something out of scope is a scoping act, not a step on the route. When a
 
 ## Invocation
 
-Two modes. Either way, **never resolve more than one ticket per session.**
+Two modes. Either way, **never resolve more than one ticket per session** — with the exception of research tickets.
 
 ### Chart the map
 
@@ -112,7 +112,8 @@ User invokes with a loose idea.
 2. **Map the frontier.** Grill again, **breadth-first** this time: fan out across the whole space rather than deep on any one thread, surfacing the open decisions and the first steps takeable now. **If this surfaces no fog** — the way to the destination is already clear, the whole journey small enough for one session — you don't need a map. Stop and ask the user how they'd like to proceed.
 3. **Create the map** (label `wayfinder:map`): Destination and Notes filled in, Decisions-so-far empty, the fog sketched into **Not yet specified**.
 4. **Create the tickets you can specify now** as child issues of the map — then wire blocking edges in a **second pass** (issues need ids before they can reference each other). Wiring sorts them into the frontier and the blocked; everything you can't yet specify stays in the fog — the **Not yet specified** section.
-5. Stop — charting the map is one session's work; do not also resolve tickets.
+5. **Fire the research subagents.** For each `research` ticket you just created, spin up a `/research` subagent to resolve it in parallel, capturing its findings on a throwaway `research/<name>` branch with a context pointer from the ticket.
+6. Stop — charting is one session's work; it hand-resolves nothing.
 
 ### Work through the map