Research Brief

This is a Hermes-native research-brief workflow skill.

Why This Exists

research-brief exists to keep research work explicit, evidence-backed, and inside the Hermes/executor boundary instead of relying on ad hoc chat narration.

Do Not Use When

• The user needs to decide whether a customer problem deserves product investment with evidence typing and customer re-entry; use product-discovery-validation.
• The request is only fresh links, citations, or current facts without a business question or decision audience; use research.
• Sources have not yet been selected and the user wants source types, candidates, or acquisition state; use source-finder.

Examples

Good example:

• Prompt: research-brief: compare three onboarding analytics vendors using customer notes and confidence gaps.
• Expected behavior: Prepare a source-backed brief with evidence, inference, confidence, and retrieval gaps separated.
• Why: The user needs business research synthesis, not recurring operations or coding.

Bad example:

• Prompt: research-brief: treat casual chat or unaccepted work as if this workflow already produced verified results.
• Expected behavior: Ask a clarification question or route to a narrower workflow instead of forcing research-brief.
• Why: The request lacks the required inputs or would overclaim work that Hermes did not observe.

Completion Checklist

• The research question, source boundaries, recency assumptions, and confidence level are named.
• Observed sources, inference, synthesis, and unresolved retrieval gaps are separated.
• Follow-up planning or handoff uses the research summary without calling it execution evidence.

Recovery Notes

• If sources cannot be accessed, state the retrieval gap and use only observed local context.
• If evidence is thin or one-sided, lower confidence and ask for a narrower source boundary.

Workflow Lane

• Current lane: Research and company ops (product-docs, source-finder, web-research, research, model-optimization, inference-serving, model-finetuning, research-brief, +20 more) - research, signals, ops, and briefings.
• If intent belongs to another lane, hand back to oh-my-hermes or name the adjacent workflow.
• Shared product, routing, compatibility, and evidence rules: omh-routing/references/skill-common-rail.md.

Use When

Use when Hermes should scope a business question, gather or summarize source-backed evidence, and preserve evidence/inference boundaries before strategy or handoff.

Strong routing signals: `research-brief`, `business-research`, `business research`, `research brief`, `decision brief`, `pricing decision brief`, `decision-ready brief`, `source-backed business research`, `customer feedback trends`, `feedback trends`, `market evidence`, `data search`, `source scan`, `자료 조사`, `데이터 서치`, `근거 조사`, `피드백 추세`, `고객 피드백 추세`

Catalog Metadata

Category: research Phase: business-brief Hermes role: researcher Quality tier: source-gated Reasoning demand: standard

Quality bar:

• State the research question, source boundaries, and recency assumptions before synthesis.
• Record each material claim as a compact evidence row: claim, source, source class (upstream official, practitioner heuristic, or unattributed), source date, confidence, and unresolved conflict.
• Keep claims that lack corroboration in an explicit unresolved list instead of asserting or silently dropping them.
• Separate observed sources, source quality, source diversity, inferred trends, and unresolved uncertainty.
• Use the brief to feed strategy or meeting work without calling it execution evidence.

Handoff policy:

Keep business research in Hermes; prepare a selected executor/runtime handoff only after a later accepted plan requires code changes.

Required inputs:

• business question
• source boundary
• recency or market scope

Expected outputs:

• evidence table
• inference summary
• confidence and uncertainty

Artifact expectations:

• research brief or source ledger when the wrapper captures observed sources

Safety rules:

• Do not claim sources were fetched unless Hermes or the wrapper observed them.
• Separate evidence, inference, confidence, source diversity, and missing-source gaps.
• Route later implementation separately through an accepted plan and coding handoff.

Runtime Evidence

Preferred harness for this skill: business-research.

omh runtime record --skill research-brief --harness business-research --status started

Record observed delegation results; otherwise return not_available or not_observed. Prepared OMH routing is not execution, review, CI, merge-readiness, or merge evidence.

• Treat wrapper memory/context summaries as advisory local context, not proof of opaque Hermes memory reads or changes. Preserve workflow intent and stop conditions; verify before claiming completion. Reply in the user's own words and the host's own voice: its SOUL.md persona owns reply language, tone, speech level, and sentence endings, progress updates included (where it sets no language, use the one the user wrote in), and OMH shapes structure and content only; OMH's record terms (surface, lane, wrapper, handoff, evidence boundary, not_observed) stay in records and tool calls, never in the sentence the user reads unless they ask about one; and when a stop condition or a decision the user owns ends the turn, offer the next action as a question rather than declaring what will not be done.

Use Hermes-native subagent/delegation features when available: native subagents -> Hermes delegation when available, otherwise sequential lanes.

Shared product, compatibility, topology, memory, harness, and execution rules: omh-routing/references/skill-common-rail.md. Load it when applicable; otherwise name an unavailable capability.