Survey
Gather sources from the web, papers, social media, and industry on a specific topic, and produce an indexed Markdown report.
This skill follows the shared sourced-writing conventions defined in
. Read
before drafting.
Quality criteria
Apply to every source.
- Prefer trustworthy sources (peer-reviewed papers > official blogs > major industry media > personal blogs).
- If the author is an individual, list their affiliation and role. If unknown, look it up.
- For papers, in addition to bibliographic info (authors, affiliations, venue, year), include citation count.
- Always attach a URL.
- Always attach a date.
- Treat official documentation and third-party articles as different reliability tiers. Do not mix them; the reader must be able to tell which is which.
Prose structure: Assertion-Evidence form
Write the body in Assertion-Evidence form — claim first, then evidence.
- Prose: the writer states the claim or summary in their own words first.
- Immediately after, a code-block quotation from the source backs up the claim, formatted per .
- On the line after the closing fence, place the source reference .
The reader grasps "what is being said" first, then checks "what is the basis". The reverse order (quotation first, claim later) is forbidden — the reader cannot tell what the quotation is for until they have read past it.
Bad example (quotation first):
The standard recipe of pretraining on huge corpora and then running classical preference-label RLHF is now widely treated as obsolete.
[industry-tracker (2026/03)]
The mainstream has shifted to a modular post-training stack.
Good example (claim first):
The classical RLHF pipeline (human preference labels → reward model → PPO) is no longer used in leading models; it has been replaced by a modular stack that separates concerns.
The standard recipe of pretraining on huge corpora and then running classical preference-label RLHF is now widely treated as obsolete. Every leading model released in the past year uses a different post-training stack.
[industry-tracker (2026/03)]
Source-reference label
Within the
[label (YYYY/MM), location]
structure defined in
, the survey skill fills the label slot with the publication or source name (media name, site name, etc.). The location is omitted when it cannot be pinned down.
Heading-content alignment
Section headings and the items placed under them must match exactly.
- If a heading is "human-side guardrails", only human conduct and discipline goes underneath. Tooling and CI/CD belong under a separate heading.
- If a heading is "failure cases", do not mix in success stories or recommendations.
- If a source spans multiple angles, either split it across the relevant sections, or place it under the most appropriate one and add an explicit note about the other angles.
- Before finalising, walk every heading and check that everything underneath it actually belongs there.
Output destination
Write the deliverable to
as a
file. Create the directory if it does not exist. Sub-agents that emit intermediate artefacts use the same directory.
Workflow
- From the user's request, identify the claim or hypothesis and the collection scope.
- Design search queries for the scope (in multiple languages where appropriate).
- Dispatch sub-agents to investigate (one per angle, in parallel).
- Consolidate the sub-agent outputs; the main agent assembles the final version.
- Write out the deliverable to as a file.
Sub-agent delegation rules
When delegating to sub-agents, follow these.
- Split by angle and dispatch in parallel (e.g. "papers & academia", "media & blogs", "social media", "industry signals").
- Give each sub-agent the quality criteria and the conventions from . Re-emphasise "no fabricated associations or interpretations" specifically — sub-agents are particularly prone to drifting toward the calling-conversation context and inventing connections.
- Sub-agent output is not the final deliverable. The main agent performs:
- Deduplication.
- Information completion (filling in missing affiliations, citation counts, etc. via additional lookups).
- Structural unification (tables, consistent section structure).
- Separation of criticism from supporting evidence.
- Explicit listing of investigation limits (information that could not be retrieved, unverified URLs, etc.).
- Removal of fabricated associations (see the corresponding section in ).
- Heading-content alignment check (see above).
Deliverable structure
# Survey of {topic}
Date: YYYY-MM-DD
Scope: {scope description}
## Table of Contents
1. [{angle 1}](#1-angle-1-slug)
2. [{angle 2}](#2-angle-2-slug)
...
N. [Criticism & concerns](#n-criticism-concerns)
N+1. [Overall assessment](#n1-overall-assessment)
N+2. [Investigation limits](#n2-investigation-limits)
## 1. {angle 1} (e.g. academic papers)
## 2. {angle 2} (e.g. media coverage)
## 3. {angle 3} (e.g. social-media reactions)
## 4. {angle 4} (e.g. industry signals)
## N. Criticism & concerns
## N+1. Overall assessment
## N+2. Investigation limits
Adjust the section layout for the topic.
Table-of-contents requirements
Always place a table of contents at the top of the report, directly after the metadata block and before the body. Writing the report without a ToC is forbidden.
- If there are ten or more sections, or fifteen or more individual items (papers, articles, etc.), use a two-level ToC. Level 1 is the section name; level 2 is the section's main items (paper titles, article headlines, ...).
- For short reports (five or fewer sections, few items per section) a single-level ToC is fine.
- Provide anchor links. Use the renderer's slug rules (lowercased, spaces → hyphens, special characters dropped) for the link targets.
- Even when the slug rule is uncertain, write the link rather than dropping it; let the renderer slugify.
- ToC entries and section headings must match word for word. No abbreviation or paraphrase.