Policy 006: Research produces texts

When outside knowledge enters the vault, it arrives as a citable text with its own provenance — not as a summary in a conversation.

What this means

Research agents tasked with surveying external literature, investigating a practice, or answering a question should produce their output as a text file placed in the appropriate discipline directory. The text should have:

• A title describing its subject, not the task that prompted it
• A date-created field
• An authors field (typically claude for agent-produced research)
• A cites field listing the works engaged
• A type: text designation
• A Sources section with URLs for web-accessible references

The text is written about its subject, not about the conversation that prompted it. A survey of digital notetaking practices belongs in information/texts/ or technology/texts/, titled for its content, not filed as “research notes from session X.” The text should be intelligible to a reader who has no knowledge of the session that produced it.

This serves policy 005 (accrete, don’t replace): the text accretes into the vault as a permanent, addressable, composable artifact. Future sessions can cite it, build on it, or supersede it. Conversation summaries cannot be cited and do not accrete.

It also serves policy 003 (ground in discipline practice): a text with proper citations and provenance is grounded. A conversation summary is hearsay.

Operational implications

• When a research task is delegated to a subagent, the subagent’s deliverable is a text file (or files), not a report back to the parent conversation.
• The text is placed in the discipline directory appropriate to its subject, following the directory organization spec.
• If the research introduces new terms or concepts, those should also be created as separate term/concept files (per policy 002).
• The parent conversation receives a summary of what was produced and where it was placed — not the research content itself.
• Slop-quality research (incomplete, unverified, or speculative) goes in slop/ with a path mirroring the target discipline. It can be promoted to a published text through the evaluate-slop workflow.
• The research cadence from policy 003 applies: external research → encode as concepts/terms → compose into texts → develop curricula → implement as skills.