Finding-Unknowns Skills

8 installable skills that make Claude help you find what you don't know — before it gets expensive to fix.

The map is not the territory. Your prompt is a map; the codebase and the real world are the territory. The gap between them is your unknowns, and with strong models the quality of the work is bottlenecked by how well you clarify them. These skills turn that idea, from Thariq Shihipar's essay A Field Guide to Fable: Finding Your Unknowns, into commands you can run in Claude Code, OpenAI Codex, or any agent that reads the agentskills.io SKILL.md format.

Community project. Distilled, with attribution, from a public essay by Thariq Shihipar (Anthropic, Claude Code team). Not an official Anthropic repository.

The idea in one table

	Known	Unknown
Known	What's in your prompt	What you know you haven't figured out
Unknown	So obvious you'd never write it down, but you'd recognize it on sight	What you haven't considered at all

Every skill below is a cheap way to move something out of the bottom row before implementation makes it expensive.

The skills

Skill	Phase	One line
`blindspot-pass`	Before	Surface your unknown unknowns in an unfamiliar area, then help you prompt better
`brainstorm-prototypes`	Before	Throwaway variations you can react to, for taste you can't verbalize
`interview-me`	Before	One question at a time, architecture-changing questions first
`reference-hunt`	Before	Use working source code as the spec, even across languages
`implementation-plan`	Before	A plan that leads with the decisions you're most likely to change
`implementation-notes`	During	Log every deviation from the plan so the next attempt learns from this one
`pitch-packager`	After	Bundle spec + prototype + notes into a buy-in doc for reviewers
`change-quiz`	After	A comprehension quiz you must pass before you merge

Install

As a Claude Code plugin (all 8 skills):

/plugin marketplace add Neeeophytee/finding-unknowns-skills
/plugin install finding-unknowns@finding-unknowns-skills

Manually (pick the skills you want): copy any skills/<name>/ folder into your project's .claude/skills/ directory (or ~/.claude/skills/ for all projects).

The one-file version: if you'd rather have the whole approach as passive guidance instead of commands, drop CLAUDE.md (Claude Code) or AGENTS.md (Codex and other AGENTS.md-reading agents) into your project root, or append it to your existing one.

Use in OpenAI Codex

The skills use the same SKILL.md format Codex reads natively, so no conversion is needed. Copy them into one of Codex's skill locations:

git clone https://github.com/Neeeophytee/finding-unknowns-skills
cp -r finding-unknowns-skills/skills/* ~/.agents/skills/        # all projects
# or, per project:  cp -r finding-unknowns-skills/skills/* your-repo/.agents/skills/

Codex detects skill changes automatically. For the passive-guidance version, drop AGENTS.md into your project root — Codex reads it before doing any work. (Paths per the Codex skills docs.)

When to reach for which

New to a part of the codebase, or a whole domain → blindspot-pass
You'll know it when you see it (design, UX, tone) → brainstorm-prototypes
You've brainstormed but ambiguity remains → interview-me
You can't describe it, but some code somewhere does it right → reference-hunt
Ready to build → implementation-plan, then keep implementation-notes running
Built → pitch-packager for buy-in, change-quiz before you merge

See EXAMPLES.md for real prompts.

Credit

The techniques and the unknowns framing come from Thariq Shihipar's essay and his companion artifacts. This repo distills them into the SKILL.md format with original instruction text; read the essay for the full reasoning and the Fable 5 launch-video story that motivates it. Coverage: The Decoder.

License

MIT for the skill text in this repo. The underlying techniques belong to their author; attribution above.

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