feat(wayfinder): burn research tickets down with subagents

Research stays a real ticket type — it's a shared blocker downstream
decisions hang on, which the frontier's blocking edges exist to render.
What changes is resolution: because research is AFK, charting doesn't
stop and read. After creating the tickets, the charting session fires a
/research subagent for each research ticket to burn it down in parallel,
capturing findings on a throwaway research/<name> branch with a context
pointer.

Charting's "fire the research subagents" step owns how research is
handled; the Ticket Types bullet just names the resolver, and the
one-ticket-per-session rule carries the research exception.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
This commit is contained in:
Matt Pocock
2026-07-13 11:10:46 +01:00
co-authored by Claude Opus 4.8
parent 6704a52ac4
commit 2602257241
3 changed files with 13 additions and 5 deletions
+4 -3
View File
@@ -74,7 +74,7 @@ The answer isn't part of the body — it's recorded on resolution (see [Work thr
Every ticket is either **HITL** — human in the loop, worked *with* a human who speaks for themselves — or **AFK**, driven by the agent alone. A HITL ticket only resolves through that live exchange; the agent never stands in for the human's side of it (a grilling agent that answers its own questions has broken this).
- **Research** (AFK): Reading documentation, third-party APIs, or local resources like knowledge bases. Creates a markdown summary as a linked asset. Use when knowledge outside the current working directory is required.
- **Research** (AFK): Reading documentation, third-party APIs, or local resources like knowledge bases to surface a fact a decision waits on. Resolved by a `/research` **subagent**. Use when knowledge outside the current working directory is required.
- **Prototype** (HITL): 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. Links the prototype as an asset. Use when "how should it look" or "how should it behave" is the key question.
- **Grilling** (HITL): Conversation via the /grilling and /domain-modeling skills, one question at a time. The default case.
- **Task** (HITL or AFK): Manual work that must happen before a *decision* can be made — nothing to decide, prototype, or research, but the discussion is blocked until it's done. Signing up for a service so its API can be judged, provisioning access, moving data so its shape can be seen. This is the one type that *does* rather than decides — and it earns its place by unblocking a decision, not by delivering the destination. The agent drives it alone where it can (AFK); otherwise it hands the human a precise checklist (HITL). Resolved when the work is done; the answer records what was done and any resulting facts (credentials location, new URLs, row counts) later tickets depend on.
@@ -102,7 +102,7 @@ Ruling something out of scope is a scoping act, not a step on the route. When a
## Invocation
Two modes. Either way, **never resolve more than one ticket per session.**
Two modes. Either way, **never resolve more than one ticket per session** — with the exception of research tickets.
### Chart the map
@@ -112,7 +112,8 @@ User invokes with a loose idea.
2. **Map the frontier.** Grill again, **breadth-first** this time: fan out across the whole space rather than deep on any one thread, surfacing the open decisions and the first steps takeable now. **If this surfaces no fog** — the way to the destination is already clear, the whole journey small enough for one session — you don't need a map. Stop and ask the user how they'd like to proceed.
3. **Create the map** (label `wayfinder:map`): Destination and Notes filled in, Decisions-so-far empty, the fog sketched into **Not yet specified**.
4. **Create the tickets you can specify now** as child issues of the map — then wire blocking edges in a **second pass** (issues need ids before they can reference each other). Wiring sorts them into the frontier and the blocked; everything you can't yet specify stays in the fog — the **Not yet specified** section.
5. Stop — charting the map is one session's work; do not also resolve tickets.
5. **Fire the research subagents.** For each `research` ticket you just created, spin up a `/research` subagent to resolve it in parallel, capturing its findings on a throwaway `research/<name>` branch with a context pointer from the ticket.
6. Stop — charting is one session's work; it hand-resolves nothing.
### Work through the map