Wayfinder

A loose idea has arrived — too big for one agent session, and wrapped in fog: the way from here to the destination isn't visible yet. Wayfinding is about finding that way, not charging at the destination. This skill charts the way as a shared map of decision tickets (questions whose resolution is a decision, not slices of a build to execute), then resolves them one at a time — one per session — until the route is clear. It sits upstream of PRD and deep planning: wayfinder produces the resolved decisions and named destination that a /prd or /deep-plan session then turns into an execution-ready spec. Reach for it only when the effort is genuinely too big to plan in one pass and the destination is still unclear; for anything you can already scope in one sitting, skip straight to /brainstorm or /prd.

Pattern adapted from mattpocock/skills (skills/engineering/wayfinder), upstream commit f3fc563; tracker-agnostic (workspace/ markdown default), HQ company-context and cross-references added.

Step 0 — Resolve company context

Same pattern as /diagnose and /brainstorm:

1. Honour explicit [company] argument
2. Fall back to workspace/threads/handoff.json .company
3. Fall back to cwd inference via companies/manifest.yaml
4. Last resort: ask via AskUserQuestion

Once resolved, derive a <slug> for this effort (lowercase, hyphens) and store the map + tickets under workspace/reports/wayfinder-<slug>/ (see Where the map lives). Load any GLOSSARY-style domain glossary the target repo carries (<repo>/GLOSSARY.md) and note the company's hard-enforcement policies so tickets respect them.

Plan, don't do

Wayfinder is planning by default: each ticket resolves a decision, and the map is done when the way is clear — nothing left to decide before someone goes and does the thing. The pull to just do the work is usually the signal you've reached the edge of the map and it's time to hand off to /prd or /deep-plan. An effort can override this in its Notes — carrying execution into the map itself — but absent that, produce decisions, not deliverables.

The destination varies per effort, and naming it is the first act of charting — it shapes every ticket. It might be a spec to hand off and iterate on, a decision to lock before planning starts, or a change made in place like a data-structure migration. The map is domain-agnostic — engineering work, company knowledge, whatever fits the shape.

Refer by name

Every map and ticket has a name — its title. In everything the human reads — narration, the map's Decisions-so-far — refer to it by that name, never by a bare id, filename, or slug. A wall of T-001, T-002, T-003 is illegible; names read at a glance. The id and path don't vanish — a name wraps its link — but they ride inside the name, never stand in for it.

Where the map lives

The default tracker is local markdown files under workspace/reports/wayfinder-<slug>/ — no external tracker required. This is the mode to use unless the company has explicitly standardised on GitHub issues for this repo.

workspace/reports/wayfinder-<slug>/
  map.md              # the map — the canonical index (see The Map)
  tickets/
    001-<name>.md     # one file per ticket, id = zero-padded ordinal
    002-<name>.md
  assets/             # summaries, prototypes, and other ticket outputs

• Ticket id is the zero-padded ordinal in the filename (001, 002, …); the name is the ticket's # Title.
• Status is plain wording in each ticket's frontmatter — status: open | claimed | closed | out-of-scope — plus a blocked_by: list. No label vocabulary, and never a triage label like ready-for-agent: tickets are decisions, not implementation work.
• Claiming a ticket means setting status: claimed and claimed_by: <driver> before any work, so a concurrent session skips it. An open, unassigned ticket is unclaimed.
• Blocking is the ticket's blocked_by: [<id>, …] list. A ticket is unblocked when every ticket it lists is closed. The frontier is the set of open, unblocked, unclaimed tickets — the edge of the known.
• Assets created while resolving a ticket are written under assets/ and linked from the ticket, not pasted into it.

Optional GitHub alternative. If the company standardises on GitHub issues for this repo, you may instead express the map as a parent issue and its tickets as child issues, using the tracker's native dependency relationship for blocking and plain status wording — anchor every gh call with -R owner/repo. The body shapes below are identical; only the storage medium changes. Default to markdown unless the user asks for issues.

The Map

The map is a single file, map.md — the canonical artifact. It is an index, not a store. It lists the decisions made and points at the tickets that hold their detail; a decision lives in exactly one place — its ticket — so the map never restates it, only gists it and links.

The map body

The whole map at low resolution, loaded once per session. Open tickets are not listed here — they live in tickets/ and are found by scanning frontier status.

# <map name>

## Destination

<what reaching the end of this map looks like — the spec, decision, or change this effort is finding its way to. One or two lines; every session orients to it before choosing a ticket.>

## Notes

<company + domain; skills every session should consult; standing preferences for this effort>

## Decisions so far

<!-- the index — one line per closed ticket: enough to judge relevance, then open the link for the detail the ticket holds -->

- [<closed ticket name>](tickets/001-<name>.md) — <one-line gist of the answer>

## Not yet specified

<!-- see "Fog of war": in-scope fog you can't ticket yet; graduates as the frontier advances -->

## Out of scope

<!-- see "Out of scope": work ruled beyond the destination; closed, never graduates -->

Tickets

Each ticket is a file under tickets/; its ordinal is its identity. Its body is the question, sized to one ~100K-token agent session:

---
status: open        # open | claimed | closed | out-of-scope
type: research      # research | prototype | grilling | task
blocked_by: []      # ticket ids that must close first
claimed_by: null
---

# <ticket name>

## Question

<the decision or investigation this ticket resolves>

The answer isn't part of the body — it's recorded on resolution (see Work through the map). Assets created while resolving a ticket are linked from the ticket, not pasted in.

Ticket Types

Every ticket is either HITL — human in the loop, worked with a human who speaks for themselves — or AFK, driven by the agent alone. A HITL ticket only resolves through that live exchange; the agent never stands in for the human's side of it (a grilling agent that answers its own questions has broken this).

• Research (AFK): Reading documentation, third-party APIs, or local resources like knowledge bases. Runs through HQ /deep-research for anything that needs multi-source, verified findings; lighter reads can be done inline. Resolved by a subagent that surfaces a fact a decision waits on and writes a markdown summary under assets/ as a linked asset. Use when knowledge outside the current working directory is required.
• Prototype (HITL): 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. Use HQ's /prototype skill (from the pocock pack) where it fits, or hand-build the artifact. Links the prototype as an asset under assets/. Use when "how should it look" or "how should it behave" is the key question.
• Grilling (HITL): Conversation via HQ /grill-me or /brainstorm, plus /domain-modeling, one question at a time through AskUserQuestion. Use /grill-me for a ticket that is a standalone question; use /brainstorm when the answer shapes the destination. The default case. The agent asks; the human answers — never both.
• Task (HITL or AFK): Manual work that must happen before a decision can be made — nothing to decide, prototype, or research, but the discussion is blocked until it's done. Signing up for a service so its API can be judged, provisioning access, moving data so its shape can be seen. This is the one type that does rather than decides — and it earns its place by unblocking a decision, not by delivering the destination. The agent drives it alone where it can (AFK); otherwise it hands the human a precise checklist (HITL). 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. For secrets or provisioning, route through HQ paths (/hq-secrets, /new-agent) — never paste credentials into a ticket.

Fog of war

The map is deliberately incomplete: don't chart what you can't yet see. Beyond the live tickets lies the fog of war — the dim view of decisions and investigations you can tell are coming but can't yet pin down, because they hang on questions still open. Resolving a ticket clears the fog ahead of it, graduating whatever's now specifiable into fresh tickets — one at a time, until the way to the destination is clear and no tickets remain.

The map's Not yet specified section is where that dim view is written down: the suspected question, the area to revisit later. It's the undiscovered frontier toward the destination — everything here is in scope, just not sharp enough to ticket. Write as loosely or as fully as the view allows; it doubles as a signpost for collaborators reading where the effort is headed.

Fog or ticket? The test is whether you can state the question precisely now — not whether you can answer it now.

• Ticket when the question is already sharp — even if it's blocked and you can't act on it yet.
• Not yet specified when you can't yet phrase it that sharply. Don't pre-slice the fog into ticket-sized pieces: it's coarser than a ticket, and one patch may graduate into several tickets, or none, once the frontier reaches it.

Not yet specified excludes what's already decided (Decisions so far), what's already a live ticket, and what's out of scope (the next section).

Out of scope

Fog only ever gathers toward the destination. The destination fixes the scope, so work beyond it is out of scope — it isn't fog, and it doesn't belong in Not yet specified. It gets its own Out of scope section on the map: work you've consciously ruled out of this effort. Scope, not sharpness, lands it here.

Out-of-scope work never graduates — the frontier stops at the destination — so it returns only if the destination is redrawn, and then as a fresh effort, not a resumption. (HQ's /out-of-scope is the durable home for ideas rejected across efforts; the map's section records the ones ruled out of this one.)

Ruling something out of scope is a scoping act, not a step on the route. When a ticket that already exists turns out to sit past the destination — mis-scoped in while charting, or exposed by a resolution — set its status: out-of-scope (an out-of-scope ticket is unambiguously off the frontier) and leave one line in the map's Out of scope section: the gist plus why it's out of scope, linking the ticket. It stays out of Decisions so far, which records the route actually walked — a scope boundary isn't a step on it.

Invocation

Two modes. Either way, never resolve more than one ticket per session, with the exception of research tickets.

Chart the map

User invokes with a loose idea.

1. Resolve company context (Step 0) and derive <slug>.
2. Name the destination. Run a /brainstorm + /domain-modeling session (one question at a time via AskUserQuestion) to pin down what this map is finding its way to — the spec, decision, or change. The destination fixes the scope, so it's settled first.
3. Map the frontier. Grill again, breadth-first this time: fan out across the whole space rather than deep on any one thread, surfacing the open decisions and the first steps takeable now. If this surfaces no fog — the way to the destination is already clear, the whole journey small enough for one session — you don't need a map. Stop and tell the user to go straight to /brainstorm or /prd.
4. Create the map. Write workspace/reports/wayfinder-<slug>/map.md: Destination and Notes filled in, Decisions-so-far empty, the fog sketched into Not yet specified.
5. Create the tickets you can specify now as files under tickets/ — then wire blocked_by edges in a second pass (tickets need ids before they can reference each other). Write cross-references in that pass too, with real ids: a placeholder id points at an unrelated ticket. Wiring sorts them into the frontier and the blocked; everything you can't yet specify stays in the fog — the Not yet specified section.
6. Fire the research subagents. For each research ticket you just created, spawn a subagent that resolves it in parallel and writes its findings under assets/, linked from the ticket. Research does not open a branch or a PR.
7. Stop — charting is one session's work; it hand-resolves nothing beyond the research tickets.

Work through the map

User invokes with a map (slug or path). A ticket is optional — without one, you pick the next decision, not the user.

1. Resolve company context (Step 0) and load the map — the low-res view, map.md, not every ticket body.
2. Choose the ticket. If the user named one, use it. Otherwise take the first frontier ticket in ordinal order. Claim it: set status: claimed and claimed_by before any work.
3. Resolve it as the type its type: frontmatter names (see Ticket Types). Read the field, not just the body: the body never states the type. Zoom as needed: open the full body of any related or closed ticket on demand; invoke the skills the ## Notes block names. If in doubt, use /brainstorm and /domain-modeling, one question at a time via AskUserQuestion.
4. Record the resolution: append the answer to the ticket under a ## Answer section, set status: closed, and append a one-line context pointer to the map's Decisions-so-far.
5. Extend the map: add newly-surfaced tickets (create-then-wire); graduate any fog the answer has made specifiable, clearing each graduated patch from Not yet specified so it lives only as its new ticket. If the answer reveals a ticket — this one or another — sits beyond the destination, rule it out of scope rather than resolving it on the route. If the decision invalidates other parts of the map, update or delete those tickets.
6. Check for the merge point: if no open tickets remain and the way to the destination is clear, the map is resolved — hand off (see below).

The user may run unblocked tickets in parallel, so expect other sessions to be editing the map concurrently.

Merge point — hand off to planning

When the map is resolved — the frontier empty and the destination reachable — wayfinder is done. Its output is a set of locked decisions and a named destination, not a spec. Hand off:

• /prd — for a straightforward effort ready for a lightweight, execution-ready PRD.
• /deep-plan — for a large or strategically important effort that warrants research subagents and the deep interview.

Point the planning session at workspace/reports/wayfinder-<slug>/map.md: its Destination becomes the project goal, Decisions so far seed the scope and architecture answers, and Out of scope seeds the non-goals. Do not carry execution into wayfinder itself unless the effort's Notes explicitly override "Plan, don't do".

Cross-references

• HQ /prd — lightweight terminal merge point; turns the resolved map into an execution-ready PRD.
• HQ /deep-plan — deep terminal merge point for large or strategically important efforts.
• HQ /domain-modeling — the modelling half of every grilling ticket; pins down the domain language the destination is written in.
• HQ /deep-research — the engine for research-type tickets.
• HQ /brainstorm — one-question-at-a-time grilling for naming the destination and resolving grilling tickets.
• HQ /grill-me — one-question-at-a-time grilling on any topic, built on the shared grilling engine; resolves standalone grilling tickets.
• HQ /out-of-scope — durable home for ideas ruled out across efforts, beyond this map's Out of scope section.
• Pattern source: mattpocock/skills (skills/engineering/wayfinder), upstream commit f3fc563.