Survey

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 documenting-with-sources. Read documenting-with-sources 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.

1. Prose: the writer states the claim or summary in their own words first.
2. Immediately after, a code-block quotation from the source backs up the claim, formatted per writing-quotation.
3. On the line after the closing fence, place the source reference [source-name (YYYY/MM)].

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The classical RLHF pipeline (human preference labels → reward model → PPO) is no longer used in leading models; it has been replaced by a modular stack that separates concerns.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 documenting-with-sources, 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 {CWD}/reports/ as a .md file. Create the directory if it does not exist. Sub-agents that emit intermediate artefacts use the same directory.