explore-unknowns

---
name: explore-unknowns
description: Guide the user through a quadrant walk that maps the unknowns of a task — open by listing the known knowns, then work through known unknowns, unknown knowns, and unknown unknowns one stage at a time, ending with a complete four-quadrant map in the user's hands. Use when a request is ambiguous or underspecified, the codebase or domain is unfamiliar, the user will "know it when they see it", a reference implementation must be understood before porting, mid-build deviations from the plan need capturing, or a finished change needs buy-in or verified understanding before merge. Pairs with [write-spec](../write-spec/SKILL.md) — walk the quadrants to burn off fog before slicing, and feed the finished map into the spec.
---

# 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.

## Preference Checkpoint — Offer to Answer on Their Behalf

Count questions the user has answered across the walk, not turns or answers
found in the territory. After about five or six, if their preferences form a
clear pattern and questions remain, pause the interview for this checkpoint.
If the pattern is still unclear, continue targeted questions and offer once
it becomes clear; do not manufacture questions just to reach the count.

1. List the preferences you have inferred, grounded in their answers, and
   invite corrections. Ask whether it would help for you to answer matching
   questions on their behalf: **confirm or edit these preferences and opt in,
   or keep answering yourself**. This replaces the next interview question.
2. Wait for explicit opt-in. Confirming the preferences alone is not consent
   to delegate; silence is not consent either. If they only confirm the
   preferences, clarify the delegation choice once, then default to the
   interview if it remains unanswered. If they decline, continue without
   repeatedly offering.
3. Once opted in, answer questions whose answers follow clearly from the
   confirmed preferences, within the scope they delegated. Ask the user when
   preferences conflict or a new tradeoff falls outside that scope. Investigate
   missing facts in the territory first; ask only when it cannot resolve them.
   Preferences cannot substitute for facts about the territory.
4. Disclose every delegated answer as you make it: **question → answer →
   preference and reason**, labeled **Answered by the agent on your behalf**.
   Small batches are fine; never collapse distinct questions into a hidden
   decision. Carry each entry into the map with that attribution, rather than
   implying the user personally answered it. Invite corrections without
   requiring approval of every answer.
5. Honor corrections and withdrawal immediately. Corrections update the
   preference summary and reopen decisions they invalidate. Withdrawal stops
   future delegated answers; keep earlier answers attributed unless the user
   asks to revisit them. Delegation lasts for this walk and does not
   authorize implementation or skip the remaining quadrants.

**Done when** the user has chosen whether to delegate and, if opted in, the
confirmed preferences and delegation scope are recorded alongside the map's
decision ledger.

## 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.

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