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 (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

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

The skills

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 into your project root (or append it to your existing one).

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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