map

A planning method that discovers the shape of a project by starting work and recording the blockers and questions that appear. It uses small items called “yaks” instead of defining the entire plan upfront.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to explore a complex goal, identify blockers, and build a work map one item at a time before or during implementation.
Why use it?
It helps when the work is unclear and important details emerge only during investigation or implementation. The map changes as new obstacles are found.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/mattwynne/yaks/map
Any agent
npx skills add mattwynne/yaks --skill map
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/mattwynne/yaks

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 22 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,731 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5 $0.00022 $0.02731
Opus 5 $0.00011 $0.01366
Sonnet 5 $0.00004 $0.00546
Haiku 4.5 $0.00002 $0.00273

Measured yesterday against content hash ba715ce820d7, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

map scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured yesterday.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

plugins/yx/skills/map/SKILL.md · 361 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 361 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

/yx:map — Yak Mapping

Overview

Yak mapping is emergent planning through action. You discover work structure by approaching goals and finding what blocks you, not by decomposing from the top down.

Core principle: "It is in the doing of the work that we discover the work that we must do." — Woody Zuill

When invoked with arguments (e.g., /yx:map build a REST API), use those as the initial goal.

Announcement

Always start yak mapping by saying:

"I'm using /yx:map to discover the work structure by approaching the goal. I'll add yaks one at a time and show the map after each addition."

This sets expectations that we're doing emergent discovery, not top-down planning.

When to Use

Use when:

  • User asks to "plan" or "map out" work using yaks
  • User says "adapt for yaks" or "plan with yaks" or "break down into yaks"
  • Starting to structure a new feature or goal
  • Need to discover work structure for complex work
  • User provides a goal and you need to find blockers

Don't use when:

  • Just executing already-mapped work (use /yx:work)
  • Single straightforward task (just do it)
  • User wants detailed specs (use /yx:prepare for fleshing out individual yaks)

THE IRON LAW

After EVERY yx add, immediately run yx ls to show what changed.

No exceptions:

  • Not "I'll show it at the end"
  • Not "just adding a quick one"
  • Not "the structure is obvious"

yx add then yx ls is non-negotiable. This keeps the human in sync with your thinking.

The Approach Pattern

Phase 1: Scope the Goal (BEFORE creating child yaks)

After creating the top-level goal yak, have a conversation to agree scope before going deeper. Don't start adding children yet.

  1. Add the goal yak and show the map
  2. Summarise your understanding of the goal back to the human
  3. Present candidate areas you've identified (if any), but as a conversation — NOT as yaks yet
  4. Ask the human to pick what's in scope for now
  5. Only after agreement, start the discovery loop on the agreed scope

Read the full file on GitHub · 361 lines

Files

What ships with it

1 file beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. yesterday First seen · 361 lines · 22 tokens per session scan A ba715ce820d7

Subscribe to this mod's changes

map is a skill published in the GitHub repository mattwynne/yaks (54 stars, last pushed 20d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 22 tokens to every session and 2,731 once invoked, about $0.0001 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.

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