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Research

Research as a Competitive Advantage

A solo operator who can research faster and more thoroughly than a team of analysts has a structural advantage. Claude Code, paired with the right MCPs, can compress hours of research into minutes.

The key shift is from manual search-and-read to agent-driven synthesis. You define the question; the agent gathers, reads, and structures the answer.

Deep Research Agent Patterns

Competitive landscape report:

Research the top 5 competitors of [your product/service].
For each, find: pricing, positioning, target audience, key features,
recent news, and customer reviews.
Synthesise into a structured report with a comparison table.
Save to /research/competitors-2026-03.md

Technology landscape scan:

Find the most actively maintained open-source tools for
[your technology area] as of 2026.
Include: GitHub stars, last commit date, licence, and key use case.
Rank by community activity.

Due diligence on a potential client or partner:

Research [company name]. Find: founders, funding history,
recent press, LinkedIn employee count, Glassdoor signals.
Flag any concerns. Summarise in 300 words.

Literature and Academic Research

For knowledge-intensive work, Claude Code can assist with literature review using PDF reading capabilities.

Workflow:

  1. Download relevant PDFs to a /research/papers/ folder
  2. Ask Claude Code to read and extract key findings:
Read all PDFs in /research/papers/.
For each paper, extract: thesis, methodology, key findings, and limitations.
Identify common themes across papers.
Output a synthesis document.

Synthesising Sources Into Reports

Raw research output is only valuable when structured. Claude Code excels at turning a pile of notes or browser tabs into a coherent document.

Source-to-report workflow:

  1. Paste URLs of relevant articles or save them as text files
  2. Use the fetch MCP, (Model Context Protocol), to retrieve full content
  3. Ask Claude Code to synthesise:
I have saved 8 articles about [topic] in /research/sources/.
Read them all and produce a structured briefing document:
- Executive summary (200 words)
- Key findings by theme
- Conflicting perspectives
- Gaps and unanswered questions
- Recommended actions

Skills to Develop

  • How to write a precise research brief (question, scope, format, depth)
  • How to evaluate source quality and bias
  • How to structure a research report for different audiences (client, self, team)
  • Basic prompt patterns for synthesis: compare-contrast, theme extraction, gap analysis

Innovative Ideas

  • Research memory: Maintain a research-log.md where Claude Code appends summaries of every research session. Over time this becomes a searchable knowledge base about your field.
  • Alert agent: Schedule a daily run that searches for news on your key topics and appends a summary to a daily digest file.
  • Interview prep agent: Before a client call or podcast, give Claude Code the guest's or company's public information and ask it to generate a briefing doc and suggested questions.
  • Citation manager: Ask Claude Code to extract all citations from a document and check whether the sources are still accessible and current.