The Research Problem I Solved with a Slash Command
A Claude Code skill that turns URL pasting into three persistent artefacts: a public essay, an internal signal log, and roadmap backlog items.
I read about LangGraph on a Tuesday. Relevant to the agent work. I closed the tab. By Thursday it was gone, not forgotten entirely, but not captured. The signal had decayed into a vague sense there was something worth looking at later.
That kind of loss doesn't feel expensive. It's quiet. Gradual erosion of interesting threads while I'm building something else.
I built a Claude Code skill to close that gap: /research-capture.
What it does
Drop one or more URLs into the command. The skill fetches each page and synthesises the content into three things.
A public essay in /studio. Not a summary of the links, a synthesis: what the technology is, why it matters structurally, what it changes about how you'd build something.
An entry in docs/RESEARCH-SIGNALS.md. Internal, permanent log. Stack implications specific to the current agent infrastructure (Moirai, MakerSuite, Claude Code). Concrete integration points, not generic ones.
Rows in docs/ROADMAP.md Future section. Each suggestion from the signal log becomes a trackable item with a link back to the source essay.
Why this pattern matters
The IDE is already where I have context. I'm mid-session, I find something useful, my instinct is to note it and get back to the task. The skill doesn't interrupt that.
The essay is the public signal: here's what I'm tracking and why. The signal log is the private layer. The roadmap items are where "this is interesting" becomes tracked work.
What the skill doesn't do is decide whether to act on the signal now. That's intentional. Not everything worth capturing is worth building immediately. The skill preserves the option without forcing the decision.
The underlying system
The skill is global, in ~/.claude/skills/ rather than a specific repo. Any session in any project can invoke it. The output files accumulate in docs/ and content/thoughts/, building a long-term record of what I've been tracking and when.
Over time, RESEARCH-SIGNALS.md becomes a map of where the work is heading. The roadmap items link back to the evidence. The essays become the public record of how my thinking evolved.
That's the system. It pays off over months, not sessions.