Legwork
Research that settles a decision, and says when it cannot
A source is judged by the claim it backs, so a vendor's pricing page proves a price but not whether the product is good. Sources only corroborate when they could have disagreed. Every finding states how well it is supported, and a run that settles nothing says so.
Install Legwork
Add the DBHQ marketplace, once
/plugin marketplace add dbhq-uk/marketplaceInstall the skill
/plugin install legwork@dbhq
Both commands work in Claude Code and in Codex. The marketplace is a public repository you can read first: dbhq-uk/marketplace (external site)
What it is good at
Judging a source by the claim it backs
A vendor's own pricing page is the best evidence available for what something costs and the worst evidence available for whether anyone likes it. Fitness is scored per claim kind rather than against a list of respectable websites, and recency decays at a rate the claim sets: a two-year-old price is worthless, a two-year-old filing is fine.
Counting corroboration on the layer it cannot inflate
Pages across one vendor's domains are one voice, and syndicated copies of one wire story are one story. Because a research run's own search fan-out inflates the apparent number of sources, corroboration is counted on independent groups reached from different search angles. Five sources from one query score one confirmation, however many publishers they span.
Gates that actually bite
The shippability check fails a report that cites a page nobody opened, cites a page it only ever saw in a search result, quotes a figure appearing on no page that was fetched, or claims strong support from a single line of enquiry. The suite ships fixtures that are supposed to fail, one per failure mode, so the gate is proved rather than assumed.
Verifying a quote against the page it came from
Pages opened during the run leave their text on disk for its duration, so a recorded quote is checked verbatim and a misquote is reported at the moment it is logged, not left for a reader to find later.
Costing nothing on ordinary sources
Retrieval runs on the host's own web search and fetch. A paid scraping fallback exists for bot-blocked and paywalled pages, and a run against ordinary sources makes zero paid calls. Every script is Python standard library only, on 3.9 or newer - that is the whole dependency list.
What it does not do
It will tell you it could not answer
If nothing clears the evidence floor, the run says so and names the closest thing it found, rather than producing four thousand hedged words. An honest empty answer is the result, and you should expect to get one sometimes.
It cannot read a publication date that is not published
Search results often carry no date. Legwork reports an unknown date rather than assuming one, which is the right call and still leaves the recency signal weaker for those sources.
It will not guess a source kind confidently
Told nothing, an unrecognised URL is logged as unknown and scored below commentary. A confident wrong guess silently moves a source between tiers, which is worse than an admitted gap.
Some sites are out of reach
Trustpilot cannot be scraped at all, so only what a search snippet shows can be quoted. The Reddit route works but is slow - ten to sixty seconds typically, occasionally minutes - and is billed per record.
Read it before you install it
Every line is public and MIT licensed. The README is the long version of this page, including the parts that are still rough.