explore-unknowns

# 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. 1. **[Known knowns](references/stage-1-known-knowns.md)** — scan the territory, then open with the settled ground. 2. **[Known unknowns](references/stage-2-known-unknowns.md)** — the questions you can name; resolve them one at a time. 3. **[Unknown knowns](references/stage-3-unknown-knowns.md)** — extract the taste and tacit context nobody has put into words. 4. **[Unknown unknowns](references/stage-4-unknown-unknowns.md)** — sweep the territory for landmines. 5. **[Hand over the map](references/stage-5-hand-over-the-map.md)** — 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](references/after-the-walk.md) — 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.