autonomous-investigation

# Autonomous Investigation Protocol

## Purpose

Provide the canonical contract for **investigation skills** — research the AI performs in the world (web
search, published data, public filings) while you review the evidence instead of feeding it context.
Where `workshop-facilitation` governs skills that ask you questions one at a time, this protocol governs
skills that *proceed without you*: they budget their questions, show their plan, label every claim, and
produce output stable enough to diff against last quarter's run. That last property is the payoff — an
investigation honoring this contract can run as an agent task, in a loop, or on a schedule.

## Input

**Nothing required** — this skill defines the protocol other investigation skills follow.
**Also useful when invoked standalone:** the target of the investigation and, above all, **the decision
the research should support**. Research without a decision is a hobby; every investigation skill asks
for the decision because it determines what "just enough" means.

Anything supplied with the invocation itself — text after the skill name, a pasted context dump, or an
appended `ARGUMENTS:` line — counts as answers already given. Use it, credit it against the question
budget, and don't re-ask.

**Arriving empty-handed? That works too.** The protocol's whole design is to proceed on best-available
evidence with labeled assumptions when nobody answers questions. When another skill references this
protocol, that skill's Input section governs what to provide.

**Example invocation:** `Run an autonomous investigation on [TARGET]'s move into workflow automation —
this supports our Q3 roadmap bet on the same space.`

## Key Concepts

### Two protocols, two jobs

| | `workshop-facilitation` | `autonomous-investigation` |
|---|---|---|
| Who holds the context | The user | The world (public sources) |
| Interaction shape | One question per turn | Question budget, then proceed |
| Blocked by silence? | Yes — waits for answers | No — labels assumptions and continues |
| Schedulable? | No | Yes — that's the point |

### The contract

Every investigation skill honors all seven clauses. They are not a menu.

1. **Question budget** — a hard cap (usually 3) on clarifying questions. When the budget is spent or
   nobody answers, proceed with labeled assumptions. This is what makes investigations schedulable:
   an unattended run degrades gracefully instead of stalling.

2. **Search-plan gate** — before researching, show a 3-bullet plan: what you'll search, which source
   types, how you'll separate fact from inference. Continue unless the user revises it. *Why it
   teaches:* reviewing a plan takes 10 seconds; reviewing a wrong report takes 10 minutes. The gate is
   the cheapest correction point in the whole workflow.

3. **Evidence labels** — every key claim carries exactly one label:
   - **Fact** — source-supported; a checkable URL sits next to it
   - **Inference** — evidence-based interpretation; the evidence is cited, the leap is yours to judge
   - **Assumption** — working guess made to keep moving; listed for validation
   Keep labels short. Things you *couldn't find* are not a fourth label — they go in an explicit gaps
   list. *Why it teaches:* most competitive "facts" in strategy decks are unlabeled inference. Three-level
   honesty is the habit that separates intelligence from confident storytelling.

4. **Do-not-invent list** — each investigation skill names its domain's specific fabrication risks
   (competitors, pricing, market share, patent contents, customer wins...) and forbids inventing them.
   Real, checkable URLs only; a claim without a source and date is an opinion wearing a badge.
   *Why it teaches:* the list tells the human exactly what to verify first.

5. **Just Enough Mode** — default output is the strongest findings in short bullets, sized to the
   decision. Verbose Mode exists only on request. Research value is decision support, not page count.

6. **Stable output schema** — section order and structure never drift between runs, so run N and
   run N+1 are diffable. Delta monitoring, scheduled refreshes, and "what changed since last quarter"
   all depend on this clause.

7. **Final Step block** — end with exactly 4 numbered next options (artifacts to build, deeper passes
   to run, assumptions to validate). Accept `1`, `1 and 3`, `Verbose Mode`, or a custom path.

### The Confidence Stacking Rule

Labels grade individual claims; stacking grades the *story*. When signals arrive from independent
collection channels (see `intelligence-collection-disciplines`):

~~~
1 channel flags it   → Watch item. Log it, do nothing.
2 channels agree     → Working hypothesis. Assign someone to probe.
3+ channels agree    → Actionable intelligence. Brief leadership, adjust plans.
Channels conflict    → The most interesting case. Someone is bluffing. Dig.
~~~

One corollary that generalizes everywhere: **treat announcements as intent until funding, procurement,
hiring, or contracts corroborate them.** Ambition shows up in press releases; commitment shows up in
filings, job posts, and purchase orders.

### Guardrails

All collection under this protocol is legal, ethical, open-source work:

- **Yes:** anything published, filed, posted, or observable in public.
- **No:** pretexting (lying about who you are), soliciting NDA-protected information, hiring someone
  specifically to extract a former employer's secrets, scraping in violation of terms you accepted.

The rule of thumb, borrowed from the competitive-intelligence profession (SCIP Code of Ethics): **if
you'd be uncomfortable explaining your method on stage at the target's user conference, don't use the
method.**

## Application

### For skills implementing this protocol

1. Declare this skill in References as the governing protocol.
2. State the skill's question budget (default 3) and the questions themselves.
3. Define the domain's do-not-invent list — name the specific things AI fabricates