Explore Unknowns Agent Skill

Explore Unknowns

The map is not the territory. The prompt, the plan, and the context window are

the map; the codebase, the domain, and the user's actual intent are the

territory. The gap between them is the unknowns — and an unknown found before

code is written costs minutes, while the same unknown found three PRs later

costs the three PRs.

This skill is a guided conversation: the quadrant walk. Together with the

user you fill in a four-quadrant map of the task, one quadrant per stage, and

the user walks away holding the completed map. The map is the deliverable;

implementation is a different task that starts only after the map is handed

over.

Two moves apply at every stage:

• Reacting beats imagining. Never ask the user to describe what they want

when you can hand them something concrete to react to — a rendered option,

a clickable mock, a decisions table. Reacting extracts knowledge the user

has but cannot articulate unprompted.

• Every artifact assembles the reply. End each artifact with the user's

next message pre-drafted: steal/skip chips, resonate checkboxes, a

decisions table, a copyable sharpened prompt — so their reaction becomes

their next message with near-zero typing.

The Quadrant Walk

Five stages, walked in order, one at a time. **When you enter a stage, read

its reference file and follow it.** Name the current quadrant as you go — the

user should always know where they stand on the map — and finish the stage in

front of you before opening the next.

• Known knowns — scan the

territory, then open with the settled ground.

• Known unknowns — the questions

you can name; resolve them one at a time.

• Unknown knowns — extract the

taste and tacit context nobody has put into words.

• Unknown unknowns — sweep the

territory for landmines.

• Hand over the map — the

completed four-quadrant map, the walk's only done-condition.

When the user moves on to build, review, or merge what the walk mapped, read

after the walk — the map lives on past

planning.

Rules

• Walk the quadrants in order, one stage at a time, naming the current

quadrant. The walk ends with the map in the user's hands — no map, not

done.

• Stages order the walk; they never embargo information. A finding that

materially bears on a decision in flight is disclosed the moment you have

it, then filed on the map under its quadrant — never held back for its

stage's scheduled turn.

• Nothing closes off-screen. Any question or judgment call the map records as

closed must have been shown to the user first — including ones the

territory answered.

• Close items as decisions, not discussions. Each resolved unknown ends as a

one-line decision plus its why, phrased so the spec can carry it verbatim as

a given. Every choice a builder later invents unsupervised is an unknown

this walk missed — a map that leaves the implementer deciding is incomplete.

• Claims about the territory cite real files actually read; invented data is

labeled as such. A fabricated specific destroys the map's authority.

• HTML artifacts are self-contained single files: inline CSS/JS, no external

requests, plausible fake data over lorem ipsum.

• Stop at every stage boundary that needs the user's reaction. Never barrel

into implementation on unconfirmed guesses — implementing is a separate

task that begins after the map is delivered.