research-driven-development

Use for evidence-led engineering when a task requires drilling into local or external codebases, comparing implementations, frameworks, libraries, or standards, evaluating strengths and weaknesses, tracing how a system really works, or researching before a consequential implementation choice. Use when the user says investigate, compare approaches, survey repositories, learn from existing projects, find prior art, or validate a design against source. Do not use for routine code navigation, a simple documentation lookup, or architecture/spec writing that needs no source research.