The research-brief skill: know enough by Monday, with sources

You've got a call Monday about something you know nothing about. So you open twenty tabs, read five articles, and walk in feeling informed. Then someone asks where a number came from and you find out all five articles were quoting the same press release.

The research-brief skill goes and looks properly. It searches the plain question, then the same question plus the criticism, then the primary source rather than the article about the source. It sorts what it finds into three piles: settled, contested, and nobody knows yet. That third pile often holds the most useful line on the page.

Numbers get treated carefully. Every figure comes with the date it's from and where it came from, copied exactly, never rounded to look tidier. If it can't find a number you clearly need, it writes not found rather than producing a plausible one. It's one of the 55 free skills in our freeskills repo.

Skills are folders Claude Code reads and turns into slash commands. Copy this one across with three lines in your terminal:

Restart Claude Code, or open a new session, and the command is available. That's the whole install. No API keys, no config.

Type /research-brief and say what you need to understand. It writes your question back sharper than you said it, then asks one thing: what are you going to do with this? A meeting, a purchase, a decision, a piece of writing. A brief for a purchase needs prices and failure modes. A brief for a meeting needs the two arguments and who holds them. It tells you which shape it's writing before it starts.

If your question is too broad to answer in a page, it narrows it to one answerable version and says plainly what it narrowed it to. Then it searches, aiming for five to ten sources across at least three different owners. If web search isn't available in your setup, it says so in the first line of the brief and marks the whole thing accordingly.

A good first result: a file in ~/research/ dated today, with the three-line answer pasted into the reply so you get the point without opening anything. Read the What I couldn't verify section before the meeting. That section is what makes the rest of the page trustworthy.

Say who's in the room and what they want. That shapes what it digs for.

The useful part is the case against. Ask for it directly so the brief doesn't come back as a brochure.

Narrow questions produce better briefs than broad ones. Name the fact you're missing.

Here's the out-loud version, what the skill does with your question and why the answer holds up.

1. 1Hook: there's a brand-new free Claude skill that takes you from twenty open tabs and no real answer to one sourced page you can walk into Monday with.
2. 2Mechanism: you give it the question and tell it what you're going to do with the answer, because a brief for a purchase and a brief for a meeting are different documents. It pins the question down, goes and looks, then sorts what it found into three piles, what's actually true, what people argue about, and what nobody knows yet. Numbers get pulled out with their sources, and anything it couldn't verify gets listed as exactly that.
3. 3Transformation: you walk in knowing what's settled, what people argue about, and which numbers you should ask the source of. And when you don't know something, you know that too, which is the part that keeps you out of trouble.
4. 4Close: no cost, and there are 55 of them in the repo. The path from prepared to actually building the thing is Claude Code Club, $9 a month. Link below.

Take the thing on your calendar this week you're least prepared for, and run the brief on it tonight. Read the What I couldn't verify section twice. Getting caught with an invented figure in a meeting is worse than saying you don't know.