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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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

• Declare this skill in References as the governing protocol.
• State the skill's question budget (default 3) and the questions themselves.
• Define the domain's do-not-invent list — name the specific things AI fabricates in this territory.
• Define the stable output schema with numbered sections; mark it "do not reorder."
• End the schema with a Final Step block of exactly 4 options.

For agents running an investigation

• Read inline invocation context first; credit it against the question budget.
• Ask only unanswered budget questions. If silence, proceed — label every gap-filling guess

Assumption.

• Show the 3-bullet search plan. Continue unless revised.
• Research in Just Enough Mode: mixed source types, real URLs captured with dates.
• Label every key claim Fact / Inference / Assumption. Put what you couldn't find in a gaps list.
• Apply confidence stacking when multiple channels speak to the same move; report the stack level,

not just the signals.

• Emit the skill's schema exactly — same sections, same order — so this run diffs against the last.
• Close with the Final Step block. If the user picks a number, execute; if they answer nothing (a

scheduled run), file the output and stop.

A copy/paste investigation brief — the contract's seven clauses as fill-in decisions, for

briefing an agent or designing a new investigation skill — lives in template.md.

Examples

Opening of a protocol-honoring run (user gave target + decision inline, so no questions spent):

> Search plan (say "revise" to change it):

> - Search [TARGET]'s pricing pages, release notes, and last two earnings transcripts

> - Source mix: company site, filings, credible press, review sites

> - Facts get URLs; interpretations get labeled Inference; gaps become Assumptions to validate

>

> *(research happens)*

>

> Key finding: [TARGET] removed its mid-tier plan in May — Fact

> (pricing page diff, May 12). Packaging is consolidating toward

> enterprise — Inference (tier removal + two enterprise-only features shipped since April).

> They will raise the entry price within two quarters — Assumption (pattern-based; validate

> against their next pricing-page change).

>

> Final Step — reply 1, 2, 3, 4, a combination, or "Verbose Mode":

> 1. Build the battle card from these findings

> 2. Executive comparison matrix

> 3. Risks/opportunities for the next 2 quarters

> 4. Discovery questions to validate the assumptions

A scheduled run with no human present: the same skill runs quarterly from a saved invocation. The

question budget is already spent (zero questions — context was inline), the plan gate auto-continues,

and the output diffs cleanly against last quarter because the schema didn't move. The delta — not the

report — is what the team reads.

See examples/protocol-in-action.md for a full worked run

(fictional) showing every clause under load — including a user revising the search plan at the

gate and an honest gaps list where the do-not-invent list held.

examples/protocol-in-action-industrial.md shows the

conflict case: four channels agree, one disagrees, and the dig changes the strategic response.

Common Pitfalls

• Report theater. Twenty pages signal effort, not intelligence. If the decision fits on one page of

labeled findings, twenty pages is a defect. Just Enough Mode is the contract, not a suggestion.

• Unlabeled inference. "Competitor X is pivoting to AI" stated as fact when it's an interpretation

of two job posts. The label isn't decoration — it tells the reader what to check before betting on it.

• Invented citations. A URL that doesn't resolve, a quote that doesn't exist. The do-not-invent list

names the domain's temptations; honor it or the whole output is suspect.

• Skipping the plan gate. Ten minutes of research in the wrong direction costs more than ten seconds

of plan review. The gate exists because redirecting a plan is cheap and redirecting a report is not.

• Announcement inflation. Treating a press release as a commitment. Announcements are intent;

corroborate with money, hiring, or contracts before you re-plan around them.

• Schema drift. "Improving" the output structure between runs quietly destroys diffability — the

delta monitor downstream now compares apples to a reorganized orchard.

• Single-source certainty. One signal is an anecdote. Escalate confidence only as independent

channels agree — that's the stacking rule doing its job.

References

• intelligence-collection-disciplines (Component) —

the eight collection channels whose signals this protocol labels and stacks

• workshop-facilitation (Interactive) — the sibling protocol for

skills where the *user* holds the context

• Investigation skills honoring this contract: market-landscape-scan, competitive-research-snapshot,

competitive-intel-watch, battle-card-builder (References section of each names this protocol)

• SCIP Code of Ethics — the competitive-intelligence profession's reference standard
• Adapted from the market-intelligence investigation contract in the

https://github.com/deanpeters/product-manager-prompts repo.