Research, on your clock
Research abilities are the opposite shape from reporting: one-off, ad-hoc, triggered by a specific question rather than a recurring schedule. Someone on your team hits a decision point — “what have we actually learned about vendor X in the last eighteen months?” — and they want the answer by lunch, not next Monday.
These abilities are templates for that conversation: a described research task, a set of sources to pull from (your team’s documents and your team’s watched feeds, plus any public source you name), and a written output in the shape you need.
Research abilities share a common shape:
- A question or task — what the team member is trying to decide or understand.
- A scope — which sources, which time range, which people, which parcels.
- An output — a dossier, a comparison table, a summary, whatever your team can act on.
- A turnaround — usually minutes, not days.
Unlike reporting, research doesn’t run on a cron. It runs when a teammate opens the agent, describes the task, and hits go.
It can read the live web, not just simple pages
A lot of the sources that matter (city and county meeting portals, planning dashboards, permit lookups) only show their content after the page loads and runs. A basic fetch sees a blank shell. Your harness opens these the way a person’s browser would, waits for the page to fill in, and reads what actually appears, so a JavaScript-heavy government site is no longer a dead end. It can also grab a screenshot of a page as evidence when you want to see exactly what it saw.