Running Investigations

Writing a good objective

The objective should be specific enough for the agent to know when it’s done, but open enough to allow autonomous tool selection.

Too vague:

Tell me about this company.

Too prescriptive:

Look up Acme Corp in GLEIF, then OpenCorporates, then FinCEN BOI, then cross-reference with OFAC.

Just right:

Identify all beneficial owners of Acme Corp and any related entities that appear on OFAC, UN, or EU sanctions lists.

Fetcher chaining

The agent decides which fetchers to call based on the objective. Common patterns:

Corporate investigation: GLEIF (LEI) → OpenCorporates (subsidiaries) → FinCEN BOI (beneficial owners) → OFAC/UN/EU (sanctions check) → SEC EDGAR (filings) → state SOS portals

Political finance: FEC (contributions) → Senate/House lobbying disclosures → USASpending (contracts) → SAM.gov (registrations) → FPDS (awards)

Individual OSINT: HIBP (breach exposure) → GitHub profile → WHOIS/RDAP → Wayback Machine → voter rolls → USPTO inventors

Multi-depth investigations

Use --max-depth to allow the agent to spin up child agents for subtasks:

redshank run --max-depth 3 "Map the full ownership network behind the top 10 SAM.gov contractors in the defense sector"

Each child invocation gets its own step budget and writes its findings back to the shared wiki.

Reviewing results

All findings are written to wiki/ in the working directory:

• wiki/index.md — master index of all entities discovered
• wiki/<entity-slug>.md — per-entity pages with sourced claims and cross-references

The wiki is plain Markdown and can be committed to a repository, rendered with any static site generator, or read directly.