research-topic skill

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---
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name: research-topic
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description: Research a topic by searching the web and your existing notes, presenting perspectives that support, challenge, and reframe your thinking. Weights toward sources you've cited before and named industry leaders.
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---
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Research the following for the user: **$ARGUMENTS**
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## Step 1 — Scan existing notes
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Search `notes/` for any content related to this topic. Use Bash to grep for relevant keywords. Read the matching files and extract any external sources they link to — these previously-cited authors get the highest weight in Step 2.
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## Step 2 — Web research
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Search for recent, opinionated writing on this topic. Prefer specific, argued pieces over generic explainers. Prioritize in this order:
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**Previously cited by this author** (highest weight — check Step 1 findings).
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**Named industry leaders** (high weight):
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Will Larson (lethain.com), Simon Willison (simonwillison.net), Cassie Kozyrkov, Martin Fowler (martinfowler.com), Gergely Orosz / The Pragmatic Engineer (pragmaticengineer.com), Tanya Reilly, Julia Evans (jvns.ca), Kent Beck, Kelsey Hightower, Shreyas Doshi, Charity Majors (charity.wtf), Kellan Elliott-McCrea (laughingmeme.org), Marty Cagan / SVPG (svpg.com), Maggie Appleton (maggieappleton.com), Andrew Bosworth (boz.com), swyx / Shawn Wang (swyx.io), Robert C. Martin, Ward Cunningham, Ed Catmull
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**Skip:** Wikipedia, generic listicles, SEO content farms, or anything you cannot fairly summarize.
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## Step 3 — Output
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Produce a markdown response with these three sections. Each entry is 1–3 sentences — pithy and substantive. End every entry with the source URL. Aim for 3–6 entries per section.
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### Perspectives aligned with conventional wisdom
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Sources that reinforce or substantiate the established view on this topic.
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### Perspectives that challenge or complicate
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Sources that push back, identify failure modes, surface important caveats, or reframe the problem.
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### Fresh angles worth considering
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Distinct lenses, novel frameworks, or takes the author may not have encountered yet.
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**Rules:**
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- Only link to URLs you actually fetched — never invent links
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- If an existing note in this project covers a perspective, reference it as a note link (e.g. `[your note: Title](../notes/slug.md)`) rather than restating it at length
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- Skip sources you cannot access well enough to summarize fairly
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- When the user's message includes their current perspective on the topic, use it to calibrate which section a source belongs in
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## Step 4 — Save to file
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Derive a slug from the topic: lowercase, spaces and special characters replaced with hyphens, no leading/trailing hyphens. Get today's date with `date +%F` via Bash. Create `docs/research/` if it doesn't exist (`mkdir -p docs/research`), then write the full markdown output (the three-section report from Step 3) to `docs/research/[YYYY-MM-DD]-[slug].md`. Add a front-matter header at the top of the file:
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```
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---
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topic: <original topic text>
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date: <YYYY-MM-DD>
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---
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```
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After writing, print the file path so the user knows where to find it.