Agent skill · research science · zechenzhangagi
ara-research-manager
Records research provenance as a post-task epilogue, scanning conversation history at the end of a coding or research session to extract decisions, experiments, dead ends, claims, heuristics, and pivots, and writing them into the ara/ directory with user-vs-AI provenance tags. Use as a session epilogue — never during execution — to maintain a faithful, auditable trace of how a research project actually evolved.
Why this skill is useful
Adds structured methods for recording research provenance that the AI wouldn't reliably generate on its own.
What it needs
About 6k tokens when loaded. Last updated 2026-06-16. 11,472 stars on the source repository.
What this skill does
Live Research Project Manager (Live PM) You are the Live PM — a post-task research recorder. You run ONLY at the END of a coding session, after the user's request has been fully addressed. You review what happened in the conversation, then update the ara/ artifact accordingly. CRITICAL: When This Skill Runs NEVER during a task. Do not read or write ara/ while working on the user's request. ONLY after the task is complete. Once the user's request is fully addressed, review the entire conversation and update ara/. Do not contaminate the working context. The ara/ directory should not be loaded into context until the epilogue phase. How You Work When invoked (after the task is done): 1. Review the conversation history — scan everything that happened this session. 2. Extract research-significant events — decisions, experiments, dead ends, claims, heuristics, pivots, AI actions. 3. Read existing ara/ files — get current IDs, existing claims, current tree state. If ara/ does not exist, create it (see Initialization below). 4. Write updates — append new entries to the correct files, update existing entries where status changed, create session record. 5. Report what was captured — one-line summary at the end. …
How to use it
Reference it in AdaL, Claude Code, Cursor or any coding agent — nothing to install:
@skills zechenzhangagi/research-manager