Research brief

Answer a research question with a short brief instead of forty browser tabs: agents on different models each take one angle, then one agent merges their notes into a brief with sources.

warning

Agents can misquote sources or invent them. Every claim in the brief must link to a source, and you should open the ones your decision depends on before you share it.

A folder for the brief

mkdir -p ~/research/vector-db/reports
beswarm workspace add --name vector-db --path ~/research/vector-db

Write the question and what you'll use the answer for in ~/research/vector-db/question.md. Every agent reads it first.

One agent per angle

Start these from a terminal in the vector-db workspace:

beswarm agent start --name landscape --agent claude --group research --no-focus \
  --prompt "Read question.md. Survey the options: who maintains each, license, hosting model, maturity. Cite a URL for every claim. Write to reports/landscape.md."
beswarm agent start --name benchmarks --agent gemini --group research --no-focus \
  --prompt "Read question.md. Find published benchmarks and real-world performance reports. Note who ran each benchmark and whether they sell one of the products. Cite a URL for every claim. Write to reports/benchmarks.md."
beswarm agent start --name complaints --agent codex --group research --no-focus \
  --prompt "Read question.md. Find the problems people hit in production: GitHub issues, postmortems, migration stories. Cite a URL for every claim. Write to reports/complaints.md."

The complaints agent is the one that keeps a brief honest — marketing pages only tell you what works.

Merge into a brief

for a in landscape benchmarks complaints; do
  beswarm agent wait "$a" --until done,blocked --timeout 2400
done
 
beswarm agent start --name brief --agent claude --group research \
  --prompt "Read question.md and everything in reports/. Write reports/brief.md: a one-paragraph answer, a comparison table, the strongest argument against the answer, and open questions. Keep every source link. Mark anything only one source supports." \
  --wait --timeout 1200

The brief shows up in the Artifacts tab. Ask the same agent follow-ups with agent prompt while it still has the context.