It's the agent most builders skip. It turns the outside world into compounding intelligence. In 3 months, it's logged 8,000+ pieces of evidence across 16 topics, and every other agent in my stack starts smarter as a result.
It's the research agent. The always-on research department inside Hermes or OpenClaw. It watches what is happening, reads my own workspace, tracks what is moving, and writes everything into a local vault that every other agent in my stack can reuse.
It is not a scraper. This isn't a daily summary bot. This part of the system ensures tomorrow's agents don't start with yesterday's knowledge.
The first version of a research agent is usually a feed reader. The better version is a librarian. The best version is an evidence operator.
Skip that distinction, and research bots become hallucination laundries: confident prose with no separation between what was observed, what was claimed, and what was actually verified.
This guide is the template. Point Hermes, OpenClaw, or any agent system at it and build your own.
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# Why This Matters
A typical research agent scrapes, summarizes, and posts a digest. Then the next run starts almost from scratch, except for a note.
That looks productive because there is output everywhere. But output is not the same thing as compounding evidence.
A real research agent should be able to answer:
• What do we know now that we did not know before?
• Which claims are strong, and which are interesting but under-evidenced?
• Which sources and topics keep being useful?
• Which signals belong to which agent, and which old beliefs are now stale?
The research agent exists because the outside world is too noisy for the main agent to parse from scratch every time.
The agent system needs a research layer that can absorb noise, preserve evidence, and route only what matters to you.
That is the difference between agents that stay busy and agents that get sharper.
## What The Vault Actually Holds
To make this concrete, here is what my live research vault looks like right now:
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Press ⌘ + S to quick-export