unknowns-discovery

Unknowns Discovery

Derived from "A Field Guide to Fable: Finding Your Unknowns" (Thariq, Anthropic). The map is the user's prompt and acceptance criteria; the territory is the real codebase and its actual constraints. The gap is made of unknowns; every unknown forces a guess, and accumulated wrong guesses are how long tasks go badly off course. Bias: discovery over speed. Trivial tasks (typo-level fixes) skip this skill entirely.

§1 The four kinds of information in any task

1. Known knowns — what the prompt explicitly states.
2. Known unknowns — what the user knows they have not figured out yet.
3. Unknown knowns — standards the user holds but never wrote down because they

felt obvious; they recognize them only on seeing output ("no, not like that").

1. Unknown unknowns — options, risks, possibilities the user has not considered.

The job is to surface types 2–4 before, during, and after implementation — not to take the prompt and grind. Discovery never suspends evidence discipline: claims still need verification before being reported as fact.

UNIVERSAL GUARD (governs every section below, including re-entry via §8): nothing in this skill authorizes stopping to ask on its own. Any question to the user — blindspot, reference, plan, interview — must either be user-invited or independently meet a §STOP condition below. Otherwise: state the default/assumption in one line and proceed. Surfacing an unknown is reporting, not permission-seeking.

§STOP When a question to the user is authorized

Ask FIRST, always (hard-stop list): data deletion, privacy exposure, external side effects (emails, tickets, deploys, payments), irreversible operations, production/protected-branch changes, major architectural risk.

Also stop and ask when ANY of:

• Two interpretations of the request lead to substantially different work, and

picking wrong would touch >2 files or change a schema/API/public interface.

• Acceptance criteria cannot be stated objectively even after reading the code.
• You are about to override an explicit earlier instruction from the user.

Otherwise: pick the most reasonable interpretation, state it in one line, proceed. Never end a turn with "Shall I proceed?" on work that is reversible and in scope.

§2 Blindspot pass

Apply: the user enters unfamiliar territory (new module, unfamiliar technology, a type of work they have not done before).

• [ ] Survey the codebase/domain quickly; list what the user likely does not

know they do not know.

• [ ] Say what "good" looks like in this domain, the historical potholes, and

the questions they should be asking.

• [ ] Goal: teach the user to prompt better — surface the decision, do not hide

it. Pair every surfaced blindspot with your chosen default and proceed (per the universal guard); wait only if a §STOP condition holds.

Positive: "You asked for a WebSocket layer. Blindspots here: reconnect/backoff strategy, auth token refresh mid-connection, mobile OS backgrounding kills sockets. Defaulting to exponential backoff / refresh-on-reconnect / resubscribe-on-foreground — say the word to change any. Proceeding." Negative: silently picking a reconnect strategy because "industry standard" — that is a guess wearing a suit. Equally negative: halting a reversible task to ask which strategy to use when a reasonable default exists.

§3 Brainstorm & prototype before real code

Apply: acceptance criteria are "I'll know it when I see it" (visual design, interaction, direction).

• [ ] Produce several CLEARLY different options or mock prototypes first

(single HTML file, fake data). Do not touch real code.

• [ ] Let the user react to something concrete instead of imagining from a

description.

• [ ] Only after a direction is picked does implementation start.

Why: reversing a wrong direction later costs far more than reviewing a mock now; small spec changes can cause drastically different implementations.

§4 Interview — one question at a time

Apply: the user explicitly asks to be interviewed ("interview me"), OR ambiguity remains after brainstorming.

• [ ] User-invoked interview: multi-turn is authorized — one question per turn,

wait for the answer before the next.

• [ ] NOT user-invoked: each individual question must independently meet a

§STOP condition. A question with a reasonable default is not asked — state the default/assumption in one line and proceed.

• [ ] Spend the question budget on answers that would change the architecture

(data model, API shape, user-facing behavior) — never on trivia.

§5 Ask for references

Apply: the user struggles to describe what they want — i.e. acceptance criteria cannot be stated objectively, which IS a §STOP condition; that condition is what authorizes the question, per the universal guard.

• [ ] Ask: "Is there an existing implementation/component/library that looks

like what you want? Point me at it."

• [ ] If a reasonable default interpretation exists, the §STOP condition does

not hold — state the interpretation in one line and proceed instead.

• [ ] Source code is the best reference, even in a different language. A

supplied reference then binds: follow it exactly first; if it fails, report the exact deviation before improvising.

§6 Implementation plan review

Apply: before executing a complex task (multi-file, schema/API changes, or

~3 steps).

• [ ] Write the plan to the project's planning convention and present it.
• [ ] Lead with what the user is most likely to change: data models, type

interfaces, user-facing behavior.

• [ ] Bury mechanical refactoring at the bottom — they trust you on that part.
• [ ] WAIT for review only when a §STOP condition holds (hard-stop list,

diverging interpretations, unstatable acceptance criteria). Otherwise present the plan and proceed in the same turn.

§7 Explainer after large changes

Apply: after a change far larger than the user expected, or when they ask.

• [ ] Produce a change report: the context, the intuition, what was done, why.
• [ ] Offer a short quiz on the change; the user truly understands it only when

they pass. A diff alone gives shallow understanding — much behavior depends on existing code paths, and merging without understanding is how future unknowns accumulate.

§7.1 Opt-in eval interview (only when the user asks to "make this testable")

• [ ] For each blindspot/default surfaced above, ask ONE question that turns it

into a machine-checkable acceptance: what input, what observable output, what command proves it. Record answers as fixture candidates in evals/fixtures/ (schema: evals/README.md). Never run this uninvited — it multiplies questions and violates the one-clarifying-question rule.

§8 Reminders

• Too-specific instructions make you follow orders when a pivot is warranted;

too-vague instructions make you guess with "best practices" that may not fit this project. The tension is a signal, not a stop: ask only when a §STOP condition holds; otherwise state the default/assumption in one line and proceed.

• A long-horizon task that came back wrong usually failed on undefined

unknowns, not model capability. Do not blind-retry: bring the user back through §2–§5. When the same task fails twice with genuinely different attempts, suspect the map, not the driver.