/storm:research

Phase 1 of the STORM pipeline. Discovers research personas, runs a simulated multi-turn conversation per persona (each grounded in retrieval), and produces the information table that downstream phases consume.

CRITICAL: Load Engine First

Load storm-engine via the Skill tool. Its "Persona Discovery", "Simulated Conversation", "Retrieval", and "Citation Hygiene" sections govern this phase.

Completion Contract

This phase is complete iff research/sources.json exists and has ≥1 entry. If --force is not set and the artifact exists, skip and exit early.

Procedure

1. Resolve output dir (see engine). Ensure research/ subdir exists.
2. Persona discovery — search the web for the topic + 2-3 related concepts; fetch reference pages and extract their section headings. Use those real structures to propose --max-perspective personas (default 3), each with a distinct question category, plus one "Basic fact writer". Write research/personas.json.
3. Retrieval probe — via ToolSearch, look for exa-mcp-server search tools (code-search, research-paper-search, company-search, personal-site-search, financial-report-search, x-search). Record which are available in run-config.json as retriever. If none and not --docs, fall back to WebSearch/WebFetch.
4. Parallel simulated conversations — launch one storm-researcher subagent per persona in a single message (parallel). Each subagent:
   • Receives: topic, persona definition, retrieval instructions, max_turns.
   • Runs the WikiWriter↔TopicExpert dialogue: writer asks a question, expert does question_to_query, retrieves, answers with source attribution.
   • Ends when writer says "Thank you so much for your help!" or max_turns reached.
   • Returns: a JSON array of {question, queries, snippets, answer, cited_sources}.
   • Launch all persona subagents in a single message (parallel) — do not serialize.
5. Merge — collect all conversation records into research/conversations.jsonl (one JSON object per line). Deduplicate cited sources by URL into research/sources.json, assigning sequential ids. Strip any inline [n] from snippets before storing (citation hygiene).
6. Verify — assert sources.json has ≥1 entry and every persona produced ≥1 turn. If a persona produced nothing, note it but do not fail the whole phase.
7. Update run-config.json: phases.research = "completed", retriever, source count.

Concurrency Note

If the user reports rate-limit errors during this phase, reduce concurrency by running personas in smaller batches (e.g. 2 at a time) rather than lowering max_turns — mirroring upstream's max_thread_num guidance.

Output

Report: number of personas, total conversation turns, number of deduplicated sources, and the path to research/sources.json.