decision-mapping

name	decision-mapping
author	mattpocock
upstream	mattpocock/skills
upstreamPath	skills/in-progress/decision-mapping
upstreamSha	b38badf7091afc614dedffc03ea8c8ad2b643cb4
lastUpdated	2026-07-02T01:06:55.000Z
tags	["Planning","Workflow","Matt Pocock"]
description	Turn a loose idea into a sequenced map of investigation tickets, then drive them to resolution one at a time.
disable-model-invocation	true

This skill is invoked when a loose idea requires more than one agent session to turn into a plan. It creates a stateful decision map in a markdown file, and drives the user through a sequence of tickets to resolve the open questions - which may require either prototyping, research or grilling. The map is domain-agnostic: it plans engineering work, course content, or anything else that fits the same shape.

The Decision Map

The decision map is a single compact Markdown file, one per planning 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.