They should have called it wide research, not deep research

Go spend a week really researching something. By day seven, you’re asking questions you wouldn’t even have understood on day one.

So why the hell do we call it deep research when all the agents start with the same question?

As you can tell, this is a story born from frustration (and a $20 Cloudflare domain).

Over the last month I needed to do a lot of research for Firmament, my main project. It’s a context layer for autonomous agentic teams. And I kept running into the same thing: I needed to understand something really deeply and instead got a summary of the first 10 pages of Google (thanks a lot gipity...)

"Why does this work?" "Is that number really true?" "Who figured this out, and how did they prove it?" I was still doing that part myself. Which was pretty much the research I needed help with in the first place. And that got me thinking about how I research things myself. I read, write things down, follow something interesting, realise I’ve misunderstood something, go back. The questions change because I’m learning and I wanted an agent to do that!

An agent that ends up asking better questions than me over time, that develops hypotheses, tries to disprove them, doesn't trust the first medium post, and is frequently telling me "your ideas are completely wrong and here is why!"

So I built one.

The first few versions were shockingly bad. Apparently being annoyed at everyone else’s research tools doesn’t automatically make yours any good. I’m now using it to develop new hypotheses for Firmament’s engine and feeding those into my auto-researcher to test. I built it to help me research, and it’s become part of how I’m building Firmament.

I think there’s a lesson here for a lot of agent problems. Before figuring out how to make an agent do something, think about how you’d do it yourself. That’s what finally made this work for me.

It takes hours, by the way. You can’t skip to the questions you don’t know enough to ask yet. But that was the whole point.