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Native research, when chosen: resolve effort, hold the plan gate, then run the acquisition loop once per dimension of the approved plan, in plan order.

Effort

Three knobs bundled in a preset; any knob pins individually, and what the user says in the request beats both.

Preset (`{workflow.preset}`)	subagents	sources/round	depth
`quick`	low (2)	5	1
`standard` (default)	normal (3)	8	2
`deep`	high (6)	12	3

subagents — parallel assistants: none (0 — inline, sequential; also the no-subagent-harness fallback), low (2), normal (3), high (6, cap 10 — beyond the 3–5 sweet spot only for genuinely wide work).
max_sources_per_round — distinct sources actually read per dimension per round (cap 25).
max_depth — rounds per dimension: initial pass plus lead-following follow-ups (cap 5). A cap, not a quota — dimensions stop early on coverage or novelty exhaustion.
validation (orthogonal to preset, default normal) — rigor rises normal < high < max; level semantics live in references/verification.md. Verification happens per dimension as material lands, never as an end-of-run rewrite pass.

{workflow.subagent_models} is an ordered model preference for assistants — first available wins; empty means harness default. Keep the lead on the strongest model; researchers at most one tier down; judgment work never on the smallest tier.

The plan gate

The one hard stop, kept light: decision, type and pack-derived dimensions pruned to it, shape, the decomposition topology — breadth-first (independent sub-questions: assistants split the dimensions), depth-first (one question that needs several perspectives: assistants split by angle or methodology, not by dimension), or straightforward (a focused ask: one assistant, a handful of calls, no fan-out — never overinvest in a simple query) — knobs in force and where each came from, which search surfaces exist (harness web search; installed search-shaped MCP tools; {workflow.external_sources} — check, don't assume), whether to run the fan-out as a workflow when the harness offers orchestration and {workflow.use_workflows} allows, and an honest time estimate (a standard run is minutes; deep runs are tens of minutes and many times the tokens).

Present as a compact checklist, get approval, then: bind {doc_workspace} under {workflow.research_output_path} — expand the folder name with uv run {skill-root}/scripts/recon_kit.py slug "<topic>" --type <type> --pattern "{workflow.run_folder_pattern}" so the same topic always resolves to the same folder — seed <folder name>.md from {workflow.research_template}, init the memlog (uv run {project-root}/_bmad/scripts/memlog.py init --workspace {doc_workspace} --field topic="<topic>" --field type="<type>" --field decision="<decision>" --field preset="<preset>"), log the approved plan as a decision, and tell the user the path.

Each dimension then runs in rounds — up to the resolved max_depth — and the report grows as material lands: the user watches the document build, not a spinner. Every digest is written to {doc_workspace}/digests/ the moment it exists — one file per assistant per round (<dimension>-r<round>-<n>.md), the digest shape below, raw enough to re-derive from.

Rounds and lead-following

Round 1 pursues the plan's questions broad-first: short, wide queries to map what exists, narrowing as the shape emerges — not long specific queries that return nothing. After each round, harvest the leads: new entities worth chasing, unexpected connections, contradictions between sources, and questions the round opened. Contradictions get priority. Promising leads become the next round's brief; note mid-course discoveries in the checkpoint so the user sees the turn happening.

A dimension stops before its round cap when either holds:

Coverage — its plan questions are answered, with the critical claims confirmed per the resolved validation level.
Novelty exhaustion — a full round surfaced no new load-bearing claim or lead.

Say which one ended it. Hitting the round cap with open questions is reported as an open question, never silently dropped.

Stop-and-write valve. If the run is dragging well past the plan gate's estimate — rounds queuing, budgets mostly spent — stop spawning, synthesize from the digests already on disk, and report the remainder as open questions with a route (a Deepen later, or a drafted prompt for the user's own tool). A shorter honest report beats a longer stale one.

The fan-out

Fan out researcher assistants for the round — concurrency per the resolved subagents level, split by the plan's topology: breadth-first gives each assistant independent sub-questions; depth-first gives each a distinct perspective or methodology on the same question; straightforward is one assistant with a small budget — never fan out what one focused assistant answers. Each assistant runs behind the research firewall: it gets its brief and nothing else — no project files, no ambient context. The brief contains:

the questions it owns, the decision they serve, and the topic
its search surfaces (specialized tools first — installed search-shaped MCP tools, {workflow.external_sources} entries whose directive matches — then generic search), plus {workflow.preferred_sources} first / {workflow.banned_sources} never
the pack's source craft and freshness bars, and the source-quality card below
its budgets — sources (the round's share of max_sources_per_round) and tool calls, scaled to its task: under 5 for a simple lookup, ~5 medium, ~10 hard, 15 for genuinely multi-part, 20 never exceeded. Either budget spent → synthesize what it has
the query craft: short queries (roughly five words or fewer) beat hyper-specific ones that return nothing; broaden when results are sparse, narrow when abundant; never repeat an identical query on the same tool; after every tool result, pause and evaluate — what did this add, what gap remains, what's the best next query — before firing again
the epistemics rules verbatim, and the return contract: a digest, not raw results — findings as claims, each with {claim, source, publisher, pub_date, accessed, confidence, class}, plus leads worth chasing and what it looked for and could not find

On each return, write the digest to {doc_workspace}/digests/ before doing anything else with it.

Spawn assistants on {workflow.subagent_models} when set (first available wins); otherwise the harness default — judgment work never drops to the smallest tier. When subagents are unavailable (or subagents is none), run the same rounds yourself, sequentially, under the same budgets and the same files-first discipline.

When workflow orchestration was approved at the plan gate, run the fan-out as a workflow: dimensions as parallel pipelines, assistants returning structured digests. The budgets, digest contract, firewall, and stopping rules apply unchanged — and however the acquisition parallelizes, digests land as files and the lead alone writes <folder name>.md, committing sections in plan order.

Source quality

One card, applied by every assistant and the lead alike. Prefer primary sources — filings, regulator text, official documentation, original papers, a company's own reported numbers — over aggregators and secondary reporting. Red flags that downgrade confidence on sight: speculative language ("could", "may", projections in future tense presented as findings), marketing register, passive voice with unnamed sources, cherry-picked or unsourced numbers, and aggregators recycling a single upstream report (that's one publisher, however many domains echo it). Answer engines (Perplexity Sonar, Grok, and kin) are aggregators too, however good the synthesis: chase their citations and cite those, never the engine. Conflicts resolve by recency, consistency with adjacent established facts, and publisher quality — never by averaging.

Synthesize the dimension

When a dimension's rounds are done:

Verify at landing per references/verification.md — at normal validation this is a spot-check of the dimension's load-bearing claims, not a sweep.
Write the dimension's section per the pack's skeleton from its digest files — findings woven into prose answering the dimension's questions, every load-bearing claim cited inline [n], confidence flagged where below high, contradictions reported with both sides cited. Append to <folder name>.md and add its sources to the running source table.
Log one memlog line per source batch (--type source) and one per load-bearing claim worth tracking for refresh — --type claim, text in the machine-readable shape ref=[n] status=<verified|unverified|disputed|overturned> class=<class> pub=<YYYY-MM> — <claim> so scripts/recon_kit.py tally and staleness can read the ledger; a later status change is a fresh claim line with the same ref= (last status wins).
Checkpoint: one or two lines in chat — what the dimension found, anything surprising, anything unresolved. Keep moving unless the user speaks up; a mid-run scope change is logged as a decision and the plan adjusts. Headless: skip checkpoints entirely.

When all dimensions are done, proceed to references/synthesis.md for final assembly.

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