Research-Before-Plan

Benchmarked against: Anthropic — Adaptive thinking Source: Agent Intelligence Protocol §6 + Company Constitution §9

Never plan with stale knowledge. This protocol ensures every technical decision is based on verified, current information — not training data that may be months old.

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The workflow

Knowledge classification

Category	Examples	Action
Timeless	Design patterns, algorithms, SOLID principles, SQL syntax	Use directly from training
Perishable	Library versions, API signatures, framework conventions, cloud service configs	Verify before using

The search cascade

1. Search UB first (search_brain) — Free, instant, team knowledge
2. UB empty or stale → Delegate to external search
   • Groq (search_web engine=groq) — Free, fast
   • Gemini (search_web engine=gemini) — Authoritative, has citation links
3. Ingest results (ingest_fragment) — Now it's a company asset
4. Then plan — Based on verified knowledge

Why this matters

Real incidents from skipping Research-Before-Plan:

Incident	Root cause	Impact
"LangGraph 2.0 Released" intel	Groq hallucinated version number	Polluted UB with false information
3 WOs rejected same day	No Pre-Flight Check on perishable knowledge	Wasted agent and Captain time
Deprecated API in production code	Wrote code from training data memory	Runtime failures

Integration

• Pre-Flight Check: Knowledge Freshness dimension (score 2 = must verify)
• Tech Freshness: Danger Zone library list identifies high-risk packages
• Cost Awareness: Search delegation follows the engine cost hierarchy