wayfinder

A loose idea has arrived — too big for one agent session, and wrapped in fog: the route from here to a plan isn't visible yet. This skill charts it: stand up a map, then work its tickets one at a time until the way to the goal is clear. The map is domain-agnostic — engineering work, course content, whatever fits the shape.

The Map

The map is a single compact Markdown file, one per wayfinding effort, git-tracked alongside the project. It is the canonical artifact — the whole map is loaded as context into every session, so it must stay compact.

Assets created during tickets should be linked to from the map, not duplicated within it.

Structure

Entries ("tickets"), each its own section keyed by a short dash-case slug that reads as a mini-title (e.g. relational-db, auth-strategy, cache-layer) — terse enough to stay token-efficient, and unique within the map.

## relational-db: Relational Or Non-Relational Database?

Blocked by: <slug>, <slug>
Status: open | in-progress | resolved
Type: Research | Prototype | Grilling | Task

### Question

<question-here>

### Answer

<answer-here>

The slug is the canonical id, used in every Blocked by edge and prose reference; the title after the colon is optional. A ticket is unblocked when every ticket in its Blocked by list is resolved. A session claims its ticket by setting Status: in-progress and saving the map before any work, so concurrent sessions skip it.

Each ticket must be sized to one 100K token agent session.

Ticket Types

There are four types of tickets:

• Research: Reading documentation, third-party API's, or local resources like knowledge bases. Creates a markdown summary as an asset. Use this when knowledge outside the current working directory is required.
• Prototype: Raise the fidelity of the discussion by making a cheap, rough, concrete artifact to react to — an outline, a rough take, a stub, or UI/logic code via the /prototype skill. Creates the prototype as an asset. Use this when "how should it look" or "how should it behave" is the key question.
• Grilling: Conversation with the agent. Uses the /grilling and /domain-modeling skills. Asks one question at a time. The default case.
• Task: Literal manual work that must be done before the discussion can move forward — nothing to decide, prototype, or research. Moving data from one place to another, signing up for a third-party service, provisioning access. The agent automates it where it can; otherwise it hands the human a precise checklist to do by hand. Resolved when the work is done; the answer records what was done and any resulting facts (credentials location, new URLs, row counts) later tickets depend on.