oldhand-research

Checks for prior art before anything new is built or added: the codebase, the standard library, the platform, installed dependencies, then open source, stopping at the first rung that holds. Reads current official docs, probes external APIs and new model capabilities read-only, spikes a candidate dependency on real messy inputs, and runs a license gate (MIT and Apache-2.0 allowed, BSD and ISC ask first, copyleft or unknown rejected) with the reviewed commit recorded. Use when the user says "is there a library for this", "has someone solved this", "what should we use", "can we reuse something", "check the license", "does this API support X", or before adding a dependency or a new capability. Not for bug fixes inside existing code, or for one-line choices. One stage of oldhand; for a whole ticket or fix, use oldhand.

License

MIT