Merge remote-tracking branch 'origin/main' into to-plan-skill

# Conflicts:
#	skills/engineering/to-issues/SKILL.md
#	skills/in-progress/wayfinder/SKILL.md
This commit is contained in:
Matt Pocock
2026-07-06 16:05:21 +01:00
27 changed files with 224 additions and 62 deletions
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"mattpocock-skills": minor
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Add a confirmation gate to **`grilling`**: the agent won't enact the plan until you confirm the shared understanding has been reached, turning the skill's existing "shared understanding" completion criterion into an explicit stop-gate. The `description` also recruits the pretrained **`grill`** leading word ("Grill the user relentlessly") to sharpen invocation, and the docs page is re-synced with the new gate behaviour.
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"mattpocock-skills": minor
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Add two adjacent Steering failure modes to **`writing-great-skills`**, both about how language you think of as "off" still steers the agent. **Negation** — the _elephant_ — is steering by prohibition: naming what _not_ to do drags the forbidden behaviour into context and makes it _more_ available, not less (_don't think of an elephant_), so the cure is to prompt the **positive**. **Negative Space** — the void — is blindness to the steering done by what you leave _out_: every decision a skill declines is delegated to the agent's priors rather than left neutral, so the cure is to read a draft for its silences and decide each omission deliberately (fill it, or leave it open as a real **branch**). Kept as two entries, not one — they carry different diagnostics and different cures — each a full `GLOSSARY.md` entry plus a `SKILL.md` failure-mode bullet, matching how every other failure mode is carried.
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"mattpocock-skills": minor
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Add the **`research`** skill — a small, model-invoked skill that spins up a **background agent** to investigate a question against **primary sources** (official docs, source code, specs, first-party APIs), then leaves a single cited Markdown file wherever the repo keeps such notes. It's delegable reading legwork: you keep working while it reads, and get back a document to grill, plan, or design against. Listed in the top-level and Engineering READMEs (Model-invoked), added to `.claude-plugin/plugin.json`, given a docs page at `docs/engineering/research.md`, and routed as a Standalone in `ask-matt`.
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"mattpocock-skills": minor
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Sharpen how the **`to-issues`** skill records structure. The "What to build" template now adds a context pointer to where the **`/prototype`** skill's code lives, rather than inlining a snippet from it. And publishing now prefers the tracker's **native sub-issues** for parent → slice and **native blocking edges** for `Blocked by` where the tracker supports them (mechanics already live in the issue-tracker doc), keeping the `## Parent` / `## Blocked by` body sections as the fallback.
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"mattpocock-skills": minor
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Change **`wayfinder`**'s claim mechanism from a label to an assignee.
A session now **claims** a ticket by assigning it to the dev driving the map, rather than setting a `wayfinder:claimed` label. The assignee _is_ the claim — an open, unassigned ticket is unclaimed — which reads more naturally in GitHub's own UI and frees the label vocabulary to `wayfinder:<type>` alone. The *claim* leading word and its "first, before any work" rationale are unchanged; only the physical expression moved.
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"mattpocock-skills": minor
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Give **`wayfinder`** a first-class notion of **out of scope**, separate from fog.
Fog and out-of-scope were conflated under one `## Fog` map section, gated by different things: fog by *knowledge* (can't specify it yet — in scope, unripe, graduates as the frontier advances), out-of-scope by *scope* (beyond the destination — never graduates). Cramming both under "Fog" made out-of-scope work read as takeable frontier (an unblocked, unclaimed item is indistinguishable from a live ticket).
Now the map body has two plainly-named sections — **`## Not yet specified`** and **`## Out of scope`** — and the skill's prose splits to match: the **Fog of war** section teaches only the not-yet-specified bucket and keeps the two-way *fog-or-ticket* sharpness test, while a new **Out of scope** section owns the scope axis (beyond the destination, closed not graduating, returns only as a fresh effort if the destination is redrawn). Charting and working-the-map now rule a beyond-destination ticket out of scope — close it, one line in *Out of scope* — rather than leaving it on the frontier or logging it in *Decisions so far*.
The **fog of war** leading word is retained: it names the concept and drives the graduate-the-fog behavior in the prose; only the human-facing map headings go to plain language.
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"mattpocock-skills": minor
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Sharpen **`wayfinder`**'s top-level purpose around **destination** as the leading word: wayfinding finds the *way* to a destination, it doesn't charge at building it.
The opening now states that the destination varies per effort — a spec to hand off and iterate, a decision to lock before planning, or a change made in place like a data-structure migration — and that naming it is the first act of charting, because it shapes every ticket. The map body gains a `## Destination` field that every session orients to before choosing a ticket, and triage's first step now pins the destination before any ticket exists. The stray `goal` mentions in the description and Fog section are unified onto `destination`.
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"mattpocock-skills": patch
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Stop **`wayfinder`** grilling *itself* instead of the human, and classify ticket types by **HITL** / **AFK**.
Students reported `/wayfinder` picking a **grilling** ticket and answering its own questions rather than turning to the human. Root cause: **`grilling`** carried a line written for the live-human case — "If a question can be answered by exploring the codebase, explore the codebase instead" — which, once `wayfinder` runs grilling inside a resolve-the-ticket frame, reads as license to answer questions autonomously and race the ticket to "resolved".
Two changes:
- **`grilling`** now splits *facts* (look them up) from *decisions* (put each one to the human and wait for their answer).
- **`wayfinder`** labels every ticket type **HITL** (human in the loop — Prototype, Grilling) or **AFK** (agent alone — Research; Task is either). A HITL ticket only resolves through the live exchange, so the "wait for the human" behaviour falls out of the label instead of being spelled out per type — a grilling agent that answers its own questions has, by definition, broken HITL.
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"mattpocock-skills": patch
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Sharpen Wayfinder's blocking rule to prefer the tracker's native dependency relationship, and update the GitHub and GitLab issue-tracker templates to match.
Native blocking is essential rather than cosmetic: it renders the frontier visually in the tracker's own UI, so the human sees what's takeable at a glance without opening the map. `wayfinder`'s SKILL.md now states that preference and rationale; the GitHub template spells out the native issue-dependencies recipe (`gh api .../dependencies/blocked_by`, frontier query on `issue_dependencies_summary.blocked_by`), and the GitLab template names the native `/blocked_by` blocking link (Premium/Ultimate) with the body-convention fallback. Both keep the body fallback for trackers that lack native blocking.
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"mattpocock-skills": patch
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Restore **`wayfinder`**'s early exit when the frontier grilling turns up no fog.
The skill used to have a **Skipping The Decision Map** section: if the opening grilling surfaced no fog of war, there was no map to build, so it offered to skip straight to implementing. That clause was demoted to a parenthetical inside the Handoff section, then deleted as collateral when Handoff was removed — never an intentional cut.
It's back, co-located in **Chart the map** step 2 (Map the frontier), where the fog/no-fog outcome is actually determined: if breadth-first grilling surfaces no fog — the journey is small enough for one session — you don't need a map, so stop and ask the user how they'd like to proceed. The ask, rather than an auto-skip, is preserved from the original.
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"mattpocock-skills": minor
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Reframe **`wayfinder`**'s description around the work it's for: planning a huge chunk of work, more than one agent session can hold.
The description does the skill's invocation work, so it now leads with the trigger that actually reaches for Wayfinder — a big effort you need to break down — instead of the softer "chart a route through a foggy problem". The skill body and fog-of-war mechanic are unchanged.