Ship Research

Spawn parallel research subagents to investigate tech choices, libraries, and patterns based on discovered requirements. Produces RESEARCH.md. Must run after ship-discover.

Research — Parallel tech investigation

Pre-condition

Read .claude/state/CONTEXT.md. If it does not exist, tell the user to run /bayes-ship:ship-discover first.

Process

  1. Analyze CONTEXT.md to identify 3-5 research areas. Examples:

    • "Best auth library for Next.js with M-Pesa integration"
    • "Card component patterns for invoice UI"
    • "Payment reconciliation: callback handling, retry logic"
    • "LangGraph vs CrewAI for agent orchestration"

  2. Announce the research areas to the user: "I've identified N research areas. Spawning parallel researchers. This takes 2-3 minutes."

  3. For each research area, dispatch a fresh subagent using the Task tool with:

    • The research question as the primary instruction
    • Relevant context from CONTEXT.md (only the parts related to this area)
    • Instruction to write findings to .claude/state/research/{area-slug}.md

  4. Wait for all researchers to complete.

  5. Dispatch a Synthesizer subagent that:

    • Reads all files in .claude/state/research/
    • Produces .claude/state/RESEARCH.md with:
      • Recommendations per area (what to use and why)
      • Trade-offs considered
      • Selected approaches
      • Links to relevant documentation

  6. Update progress.json: set phases.research.status to "complete".

  7. Present key recommendations to the user as a brief summary.

  8. Output: "Ready. Run /bayes-ship:ship-spec to generate the PRD."

Rules

  • This phase is fully autonomous. Do not ask the user for input during research.
  • Each researcher subagent gets a clean context. Do not pass the full CONTEXT.md to every researcher — only the relevant section.
  • If a research area yields no useful results, note this in RESEARCH.md rather than guessing.