research-patterns

What problem does it solve?

Starting new features or architectural decisions without proper research can lead to suboptimal solutions, wasted effort, and technical debt. This Skill provides a structured methodology for conducting thorough technical research, ensuring you build on industry best practices and make informed decisions.

Core Features & Use Cases

• Structured Research Methodology: Guides you through defining research questions, searching internal codebases, and performing external web research with optimal query strategies.
• Source Quality Evaluation: Provides a framework for evaluating the credibility, recency, and content quality of research sources.
• Actionable Findings Templates: Offers templates to distill complex research into clear, implementation-ready guides, including pattern comparisons, implementation steps, and security analyses.
• Use Case: When tasked with designing a new caching system, this Skill guides you to first check existing codebase patterns, then research external solutions (e.g., "distributed caching best practices 2025"), evaluate sources, and finally produce a detailed findings document with code examples and tradeoffs.

Quick Start

1. Define your research question:

What: Webhook handling system

Why: Integrate with 3rd-party services

Scope: IN - signature verification, retry logic

Success: Secure, reliable, handles 1000+ webhooks/min

2. Search existing codebase first (grep for keywords).

3. If no internal pattern, use WebSearch query templates:

"{topic} best practices {current_year}"

"{topic} {language} implementation"