# Deep Research

Traffic-light research system with 37 quality elements across three tiers. Every research task gets 14 mandatory RED elements. Higher-stakes work adds 15 conditional YELLOW elements. Life-safety and major decisions trigger 8 GREEN elements.

**When to use this**
Any research task where the answer matters — product decisions, market analysis, competitive intelligence, investment research, fact verification. If you are about to make a decision based on what you found, use this.

**The process**

1. **Decompose** the question into atomic sub-questions. Rank by importance. Research each independently.
2. **Generate hypotheses** before researching. List all plausible explanations. Rate evidence against each, not just your favourite.
3. **Map stakeholders.** Who benefits? Who loses? Who funds? Who is incentivised to mislead?
4. **Triangulate.** Three independent sources with different biases per key claim. If sources that disagree on everything else agree on THIS, it is probably true.
5. **Check freshness.** AI news: 48 hours. Academic papers: 2 years. Market data: 30 days. Historical facts: no expiry but verify originals.
6. **Contrarian search.** Spend 20% of your time finding evidence AGAINST your emerging conclusion. If you cannot find any, you have not looked hard enough.
7. **Branch.** When a search leads somewhere unexpected, follow that thread. Maintain parallel paths. Merge results. Prune dead ends.
8. **Minimum 10 cycles** of search-refine before declaring research complete. Detect convergence (when new results stop adding new information) and stop.

**Output format**
- Executive summary: 1 page, easy to scan, bold key words, bullet points, confidence level, what is still unknown
- Full research underneath: as long as needed, source citations throughout, insight stacking (each section builds on the previous, no circling)

**Pre-prepared sub-agents**

**1. Research agent** — searches sources, gathers facts, writes findings with provenance
**2. Hypothesis analyst** — lists all plausible explanations, rates evidence against each using competing-hypotheses methodology
**3. Synthesis agent** — triangulates across sources, identifies convergence, writes the executive summary

**Tips**
- The first hypothesis that feels right is usually the most biased. Always generate alternatives before researching.
- "Statistically significant" with tiny effect size is meaningless. Always ask "how much?" not just "is there an effect?"
- An unverified URL claim is a false claim. Always check that links resolve before presenting them.

**Tags:** Analysis & research, Education