About scout
scout is a research skill for investigating production practices and failure modes, aimed at architecture and technical decision-making. It triangulates authoritative standards, engineering case studies, and postmortems under a capped search budget.
Key features
- 01Ranks sources by authority
- 02Limits searches and fetched pages
- 03Triangulates standards, case studies, and postmortems
- 04Produces a structured Scout Report
- 05Routes fit questions to /clarify and changes to /changeset
Use cases
- 01Assessing a technical pattern against production precedents
- 02Finding operational trade-offs and failure modes
- 03Preparing evidence for an architectural decision
Install
Copy the command and run it in a terminal.
$
npx skills add https:/ / github.com/ venhdev/ zenforge --skill scoutAfter installing, type/scoutin Claude Code to confirm it loaded.
Details
From the project READMEscout — Real-System Best Practices & Production Archetype Engine
Domain Rubric
1. Source Authority Hierarchy
Triangulate technical inquiries against authoritative production evidence:
- Tier 1 (Canonical Standards & Official Specs): RFCs, language specifications, cloud vendor reference architectures, and formal technical papers.
- Tier 2 (High-Scale Production Engineering): Tech blogs and architecture disclosures from proven high-scale engineering organizations (e.g., Stripe, Netflix, Cloudflare, Discord, Uber, Meta).
- Tier 3 (Battle Scars & Postmortems): Documented production outages, postmortems, and root-cause analyses revealing edge cases, operational bottlenecks, and failure modes.
- Exclusion Filter: Exclude SEO-optimized content farms, unverified personal blog posts, vendor marketing collateral, and unvetted AI summaries.
2. Search & Inclusion Budget
- Exploration Ceiling: Maximum 8 search queries and 10 fetched pages per scouting run.
- Inclusion Budget: Synthesize from 3 to 5 premier, high-signal sources.
- Short-Circuit Stop: Terminate search as soon as the canonical pattern and known failure modes are triangulated with primary evidence.
Canonical Output Contract
# Scout Report: <Topic / Inquiry>
## 1. Executive Summary
- **Canonical Production Archetype**: <Boring, battle-tested standard approach adopted by industry leaders>
- **Operational Reality**: <Key complexity, maintenance overhead, or scaling bottleneck in practice>
## 2. Industry Precedents & Battle Scars
| Source / Organization | Pattern Deployed | Production Scale / Context | Known Failure Mode / Trade-off |
| :--- | :--- | :--- | :--- |
| <Org / Paper> | <Architecture / Tool> | <Traffic, Data Volume, SLA> | <Failure point, latency spike, cost trap> |
## 3. Recommended Baseline vs. Traps
- **Recommended Baseline**: <Simplest robust architecture meeting requirements without premature optimization>
- **Premature Traps to Avoid**: <Over-engineered patterns or hype-driven tools that introduce unnecessary failure modes>
## 4. Primary Citations
- [<Source Title>](<Verified URL>) — <Core insight or concrete data point extracted>
Routing
- Deliberate trade-offs or evaluate architectural fit for the project → (via /clarify).
- Baseline is accepted, adequately supported, and the caller requests change planning → (via /changeset).
Execution Protocol
-
Query Triangulation & Dispatch:
- Formulate 2 to 3 targeted search queries crossing: canonical standards/RFCs, high-scale engineering cases, and failure postmortems.
- Launch
researchsubagent(s) dynamically scaled to inquiry complexity or caller-declared budget (Role:Real-System Research Scout) supplying:- The triangulated queries and Search Budget (max 8 queries, 10 fetched pages).
- The Canonical Output Contract above as the required output contract (offload deep comparative dossiers to
.agents/scratch/scout-dossier.mdwhen extensive).
- Mandate the subagent to inspect full page bodies via URL tools before synthesizing; cite strictly verified URLs and never synthesize from search snippets alone.
-
Synthesis & Halt:
- Emit the completed report into the conversation stream (with pointers to any offloaded dossiers) and halt turn immediately.
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