finding-unknowns

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

One command, any agent (recommended): Vercel's skills CLI auto-detects your coding agent (Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, Copilot, Gemini, and more) and installs the skills into the right place for each:

npx skills add Neeeophytee/finding-unknowns-skills

Add --list to preview the 8 skills first, or --skill blindspot-pass to install just one. (Discoverable on skills.sh.)

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 Cursor

The npx skills add Neeeophytee/finding-unknowns-skills command above detects Cursor and installs the skills into ~/.cursor/skills/ for you — no manual step. (Verified: Vercel's CLI discovers all 8 skills in this repo.)

Use in OpenAI Codex

The skills use the same SKILL.md format Codex reads natively, so no conversion is needed. Either run npx skills add Neeeophytee/finding-unknowns-skills (it detects Codex), or copy them into a Codex skill location:

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. Tested with Codex CLI v0.143: all 8 skills and their trigger descriptions load into the model-visible prompt (verifiable yourself with codex debug prompt-input). (Paths per the Codex skills docs.)

When to reach for which