exiao/product-factory/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.

1. [Known unknowns](references/stage-2-known-unknowns.md), the questions

you can name; resolve them one at a time.

1. [Unknown knowns](references/stage-3-unknown-knowns.md), extract the

taste and tacit context nobody has put into words.

1. [Unknown unknowns](references/stage-4-unknown-unknowns.md), sweep the

territory for landmines.

1. [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, the map lives on past planning.

How this fits Eric's workflow

• Feeds the plan. The finished map is the input to the plan / writing-plans

skills: every closed unknown becomes a given in the plan, so the plan describes decided architecture, not open questions. This is the front half of the "spell out your decisions" loop, resolve the unknowns here, list them in the plan, then audit-choices verifies at merge time.

• Sibling to `grilling`. grilling interviews you relentlessly to surface

unresolved decisions; use it when the task is underspecified and you want a fast back-and-forth. Use explore-unknowns when you want the structured four-quadrant map as a durable artifact, especially for unfamiliar code/domain.

• Cheaper than a prototype, same goal. When the risk is a technical

feasibility assumption, the plan skill's "prototype first" pitfall still applies, the quadrant walk surfaces which assumption to prototype.

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 plan 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 third-party

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.

Source: David Zhang (@dzhng), github.com/dzhng/skills; original quadrant-walk concept from Thariq (@trq212). Cross-refs adapted to Eric's plan/writing-plans/ grilling/audit-choices skills.