Find a route through a large project

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Skill Vault video planned · Video planned

Install

Public release v0.1.2 — install the latest source or pin the tested release.

Install latest

npx skills@latest add MattEspo23/skills --skill wayfinder

Reproducible install

npx skills@latest add 'MattEspo23/skills#v0.1.2' --skill wayfinder

Clean installs are verified for Codex and Claude Code. The installer copies editable files into the selected agent; review every Skill before giving it tool access.

This is the public, editable adapted baseline. Its deeper Espo-specific revision and Skill Vault video are planned; the released source can be installed now.

What it does

wayfinder takes an effort too big for one agent session — an idea whose destination you can name but whose route you cannot yet see — and charts it as a shared map of decision tickets on your issue tracker, then resolves them one at a time until the way is clear.

It plans, it does not do. Every ticket holds a question whose resolution is a decision, not a slice of a build to execute, and the map is finished when nothing is left to decide before someone goes and builds the thing. That one rule is what separates a wayfinder ticket from an ordinary implementation ticket, and it is the rule agents break most often. When the map clears, wayfinder hands off; it does not carry on into code.

When to reach for it

You invoke this by typing /wayfinder — the agent won't reach for it on its own.

It is the heaviest, densest flow in the set, so the trigger is narrow: the effort has to be genuinely larger than one agent session can hold, and the route to the destination has to be foggy. The split is a clean one: /grill-with-docs for single-session planning, /wayfinder for multi-session planning.

Greenfield is not a requirement. Wayfinder is used routinely on legacy and half-built codebases, and it is arguably sharper there, because a lot of the fog is "what is already true here" rather than "what should we do".

Prerequisites

The map and its tickets live on the repo's issue tracker, so wayfinder needs the tracker wiring that setup-espo-skills lays down. That step writes a "Wayfinding operations" section describing how the map, its child tickets, blocking edges, and frontier queries are expressed for GitHub, GitLab, or local markdown. Wayfinder resolves that doc through the pointer in your CLAUDE.md / AGENTS.md rather than a fixed path; with no tracker configured at all it falls back to local markdown files.

The tracker is not decoration. Blocking is what renders the frontier visually in the tracker's own UI, and a tracker without native dependency links — a self-hosted Gitea, say — degrades wayfinder to inferring blockers from the map text, which works but needs closer supervision.

The map, the fog, and the frontier

The map is a single issue labelled wayfinder:map; its tickets are its child issues. It is an index, not a store — a decision lives in exactly one place, its ticket, and the map only gists it and links. A session loads the map at low resolution and zooms into individual tickets on demand, which is what lets a map keep growing without every session paying for its whole history.

Four things live on it:

• Destination — what reaching the end of this map looks like. Naming it is the first act of charting, before any ticket exists, because the destination fixes the scope every ticket is measured against.
• Decisions so far — one line per closed ticket, each linking to where the detail actually lives.
• Not yet specified — the fog of war. Decisions you can tell are coming but cannot yet phrase sharply. The test for fog versus ticket is whether you can state the question precisely now, not whether you can answer it. Resolving a ticket clears the fog ahead of it and graduates whatever is now specifiable into fresh tickets.
• Out of scope — work ruled beyond the destination. Fog only ever gathers toward the destination, so out-of-scope work is closed and never graduates.

The frontier is the open, unblocked, unclaimed tickets — the edge of the known. A session claims a ticket by assigning it to itself before doing any work, so the assignee is the claim and concurrent sessions skip it. Tickets are referred to by name throughout, never by a bare #42; a wall of issue numbers is illegible in narration.

The four decision-ticket types

Every ticket carries a wayfinder:<type> label, and is either HITL — worked with a human who speaks for themselves — or AFK, driven by the agent alone. A HITL ticket only resolves through the live exchange; an agent that answers its own grilling questions has broken it.

task is the only type that does rather than decides, and it earns its place by unblocking a decision — never by delivering a piece of the destination. This is the type that goes wrong most often in practice: agents interpret it as an implementation step and start writing product code inside the map.

Research is the only exception to one ticket per session.

Common questions

How is this different from /grill-with-docs? Which should I start with? Session count, not project size. /grill-with-docs is single-session planning; wayfinder is multi-session planning. If you can hold the whole thing in one conversation, grilling is the cheaper and better tool, and wayfinder is genuinely slower and denser for that case. The community shorthand that has settled on it: wayfinder only makes sense if the work doesn't fit into a single session. This is by a distance the most-asked wayfinder question, and it keeps being asked because the descriptions do not tell you where your own task sits on that line — you have to judge the session count yourself.

When it asks for the "destination", does it mean the end of this session or the end of everything? The whole map — the destination of the entire map, not just the initial session. The question reads ambiguously because wayfinder is by definition a multi-session tool, so a session-scoped answer never makes sense. Typical destinations are a spec to hand off, a decision to lock before planning starts, a proof of concept, or a change made in place like a data migration.

The map is cleared. Why do I still need /to-spec and /to-tickets — didn't wayfinder already write the spec and make the tickets? No. Wayfinder's tickets are decision tickets, and by the time the map closes they are all closed too. What is left is a map full of linked decisions, which is not a build plan. to-spec collapses those linked decisions into one spec — /to-spec #<map_issue> — and to-tickets slices that into tracer-bullet implementation tickets. Looping the map straight into implement skips the collapse and throws the linked detail away. Go straight to implementation only when the effort turned out genuinely small. People do run the abbreviated pipeline and report it working; the two extra steps buy you an explicit spec artifact that a reviewer or a colleague can read, which matters more the less solo you are.

My agent started writing production code in the middle of a wayfinder session. The most-reported failure with this skill, and there is a real hole behind it. Wayfinder's "plan, don't do" default can be overridden in the map's Notes — but the Notes are written by the agent, so the constraint and its exemption live in the same file the constrained party owns. One user watched an agent write "this map carries execution" into its own Notes and then read it back in later sessions as its own licence, building on a live server. There is no hard in-skill stop for "I meant the default." Until there is: read the Notes on any map you didn't chart yourself, keep implementation in its own sessions, and treat any wayfinder:task that looks like a slice of the build as mis-typed.

I charted 27 tickets, and by the time I got to the thirteenth, the rest no longer made sense. A real and repeatedly-reported outcome, verbatim from a field report. Wayfinder's default instinct is to plan comprehensively, and a map whose later tickets rest on assumptions the earlier ones invalidate is exactly the waterfall trap the skill is accused of. Two things push back on it. Scope the map to a bounded destination rather than to the whole product — practitioners consistently report that maps scoped to one defined epic behave better than a sprawling "implement V1", and planning something very big is not the goal in the first place — shipping small increments is. And prototype aggressively: the whole reason the route stays current is that uncertainty is flushed out by cheap concrete artifacts before implementation depends on it. Wayfinder is "prototypemaxxing", not "planmaxxing".

Can I work several tickets in parallel? The frontier is built to show you what is takeable, and blocking edges are there so parallel work is safe on paper. In practice one-at-a-time is the safer default. Users working two grilling tickets at once get asked in one session a question they just answered in the other, because the sessions share no context. There is also a known gap on prototype tickets: an agent has been reported building three UI variations, choosing one itself, and closing the ticket — the selection is yours to make, and the skill does not currently say so loudly enough. If you do run in parallel, review the dependency graph yourself first.

Do I have to use GitHub Issues? No — any issue tracker works. GitHub is the best-supported path because its native sub-issues and blocking relationships are what make the frontier visible without opening the map; GitLab, Linear, Jira and local markdown all get used. Two honest caveats. A tracker with no native blocking means the dependency graph is inferred from text and needs manual correction. And local markdown puts the artifacts in your repo, which is not recommended: storing this material in the repo tends to lead to accidental persistence. Open-source maintainers hit the opposite problem — public trackers filling with agent-generated planning tickets — and tend to choose local markdown anyway.

The grilling is exhausting. Every question is three paragraphs long. This is the sharpest live complaint about wayfinder and it is not resolved. The decomposition one user gave: the verbosity itself causes decision exhaustion, and the length strips out why a question is being asked, so you lose the chain from decision to decision as the map gets longer. The verbosity looks like a property of the current set of models rather than of the skill, and no fix has landed. Practitioner mitigations in circulation: run a lower reasoning effort, and put a plain-language instruction in your global CLAUDE.md. Expect to spend real thought here regardless — the amount of thinking wayfinder demands from you is not a defect, it is most of what it is for.

A decision I already closed turned out to be wrong. Do I edit the old ticket or make a new one? There is no official guidance, and the agent's instinct is unhelpful: it tends to design around the bad decision rather than challenge it, so you have to steer manually. What does work is telling wayfinder plainly what changed — it updates the map, revises the affected tickets, and comments on already-closed ones. Scope changes mid-map are recoverable. A map you designed to change is a scoping smell.

Where did decision-mapping go? It is this skill, renamed to wayfinder in v1.1 and invoked as /wayfinder. "Decision map" was jargon and was also inaccurate, since only one of the four ticket types is really a decision by itself. The reframe gave the skill one coherent vocabulary — destination, fog of war, frontier, the map — instead of an invented term layered on top. The unit kept the "decision" word, though: a decision ticket is what a wayfinder ticket is called, precisely to stop people reading it as an implementation ticket.

It's working if

• The destination is written down and agreed before a single ticket exists.
• Every open ticket reads as a question. Any ticket that reads "build the X" is either mis-typed or belongs downstream of the map.
• You can look at your tracker and see which tickets are takeable without opening the map — that is the frontier rendering itself through native blocking.
• A session resolves one ticket, posts the answer as a resolution comment, closes it, and leaves one line on the map's Decisions so far. Then it stops.
• Not yet specified shrinks over time. A patch of fog that graduates into a ticket disappears from that section rather than living in both places.
• When the opening breadth-first grill turns up no fog at all, the skill stops and tells you the effort is small enough to skip the map.
• The session that finishes the map hands you toward a spec, not a pull request.

Where it fits

wayfinder is a situational on-ramp, not the default front door. The grill-led idea → ship chain is still where most work starts; wayfinder is what you climb onto when the idea is too big to hold in one session, and it merges back onto that chain at to-spec, because a cleared map hands off rather than builds.

Underneath, it is mostly other skills wearing wayfinder's scheduling: grilling and domain-modeling resolve the default ticket type, prototype resolves the tickets that talking cannot, and research runs as a subagent so its reading never lands in your session. handoff is the bridge in and out — into a map from a conversation that outgrew itself, out of one when a side quest appears mid-session. For anything else, ask-espo routes over the whole set.

Try it once

Use the core behavior in one conversation before installation. The repeatable Skill package is the primary path when you want the behavior available across future work.

The destination is [describe it], but the route is unclear. Chart only the decisions blocking a reliable plan, classify each decision ticket, and identify the current frontier. Do not start implementation.

Source & license

Released in EspoAI Skills v0.1.2; adapted from mattpocock/skills v1.2.3. The released package is skills/engineering/wayfinder/SKILL.md.

The public package is MIT-licensed and pinned here to the exact release commit. View the released EspoAI source

The adapted baseline preserves the upstream copyright, MIT permission notice, and pinned provenance. View the original pinned source

Skill package files

The full Skill text as copied from content/skill-vault/skills/wayfinder/. Supporting agent configuration files stay in that folder.

SKILL.md

---
name: wayfinder
description: Plan a huge chunk of work — more than one agent session can hold — as a shared map of decision tickets on your issue tracker, and resolve them one at a time until the way to the destination is clear.
---

A loose idea has arrived — too big for one agent session, and wrapped in fog: the way from here to the **destination** isn't visible yet. Wayfinding is about finding that way, not charging at the destination. This skill charts the way as a **shared map** on the repo's issue tracker, then works its **decision tickets** — questions whose resolution is a decision, not slices of a build to execute — one at a time until the route is clear.

The destination varies per effort, and naming it is the first act of charting — it shapes every ticket. It might be a spec to hand off and iterate on, a decision to lock before planning starts, or a change made in place like a data-structure migration. The map is domain-agnostic — engineering work, course content, whatever fits the shape.

## Plan, don't do

Wayfinder is **planning** by default: each ticket resolves a decision, and the map is done when the way is clear — nothing left to decide before someone goes and does the thing. The pull to just do the work is usually the signal you've reached the edge of the map and it's time to hand off. An effort can override this in its **Notes** — carrying execution into the map itself — but absent that, produce decisions, not deliverables.

## Refer by name

Every map and ticket is an issue, so it has a **name** — its title. In everything the human reads — narration, the map's Decisions-so-far — refer to it by that name, never by a bare id, number, or slug. A wall of `#42, #43, #44` is illegible; names read at a glance. The id and URL don't vanish — a name wraps its link — but they ride _inside_ the name, never stand in for it.

## The Map

The map is a single issue on this repo's issue tracker, labelled `wayfinder:map` — the canonical artifact. Its tickets are child issues of the map.

The map is an **index**, not a store. It lists the decisions made and points at the tickets that hold their detail; a decision lives in exactly one place — its ticket — so the map never restates it, only gists it and links.

**Where the map, its child tickets, blocking, and frontier queries physically live is tracker-specific.** The issue tracker should have been provided to you — run `/setup-espo-skills` if not. Consult the tracker doc's "Wayfinding operations" section for how _this_ repo expresses them. If no tracker has been provided, default to the local-markdown tracker.

### The map body

The whole map at low resolution, loaded once per session. Open tickets are **not** listed — they are open child issues, found by query.

```markdown
## Destination

<what reaching the end of this map looks like — the spec, decision, or change this effort is finding its way to. One or two lines; every session orients to it before choosing a ticket.>

## Notes

<domain; skills every session should consult; standing preferences for this effort>

## Decisions so far

<!-- the index — one line per closed ticket: enough to judge relevance, then zoom the link for the detail the ticket holds -->

- [<closed ticket title>](link) — <one-line gist of the answer>

## Not yet specified

<!-- see "Fog of war": in-scope fog you can't ticket yet; graduates as the frontier advances -->

## Out of scope

<!-- see "Out of scope": work ruled beyond the destination; closed, never graduates -->
```

### Tickets

Each ticket is a **child issue** of the map; the tracker's issue id is its identity. Its body is the question, sized to one 100K token agent session:

```markdown
## Question

<the decision or investigation this ticket resolves>
```

Each ticket carries a `wayfinder:<type>` label — one of `research`, `prototype`, `grilling`, `task` (see [Ticket Types](#ticket-types)).

A session **claims** a ticket by assigning it to the dev driving the map, **first**, before any work, so concurrent sessions skip it. That assignee _is_ the claim: an open, unassigned ticket is unclaimed.

Blocking uses the tracker's **native** dependency relationship — essential because it renders the frontier _visually_ in the tracker's own UI, so the human sees what's takeable without opening the map. Only a tracker that lacks native blocking falls back to a body convention. A ticket is **unblocked** when every ticket blocking it is closed; the **frontier** is the open, unblocked, unclaimed children — the edge of the known.

The answer isn't part of the body — it's recorded on resolution (see [Work through the map](#work-through-the-map)). Assets created while resolving a ticket are linked from the issue, not pasted in.

## Ticket Types

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 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. The default case. Always invoke the /grilling and /domain-modeling skills.
- **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.

## Fog of war

The map is _deliberately_ incomplete: don't chart what you can't yet see. Beyond the live tickets lies the **fog of war** — the dim view of decisions and investigations you can tell are coming but can't yet pin down, because they hang on questions still open. Resolving a ticket clears the fog ahead of it, graduating whatever's now specifiable into fresh tickets — one at a time, until the way to the destination is clear and no tickets remain.

The map's **Not yet specified** section is where that dim view is written down: the suspected question, the area to revisit later. It's the undiscovered frontier _toward_ the destination — everything here is in scope, just not sharp enough to ticket. Write as loosely or as fully as the view allows; it doubles as a signpost for collaborators reading where the effort is headed.

**Fog or ticket?** The test is whether you can state the question precisely now — _not_ whether you can answer it now.

- **Ticket when** the question is already sharp — even if it's blocked and you can't act on it yet.
- **Not yet specified when** you can't yet phrase it that sharply. Don't pre-slice the fog into ticket-sized pieces: it's coarser than a ticket, and one patch may graduate into several tickets, or none, once the frontier reaches it.

**Not yet specified** excludes what's already decided (Decisions so far), what's already a live ticket, and what's out of scope (the next section).

## Out of scope

Fog only ever gathers _toward_ the destination. The destination fixes the scope, so work beyond it is **out of scope** — it isn't fog, and it doesn't belong in **Not yet specified**. It gets its own **Out of scope** section on the map: work you've consciously ruled out of _this_ effort. Scope, not sharpness, lands it here.

Out-of-scope work never graduates — the frontier stops at the destination — so it returns only if the destination is redrawn, and then as a fresh effort, not a resumption.

Ruling something out of scope is a scoping act, not a step on the route. When a ticket that already exists turns out to sit past the destination — mis-scoped in while charting, or exposed by a resolution — **close it** (a closed ticket is unambiguously off the frontier) and leave one line in the **Out of scope** section: the gist plus why it's out of scope, linking the closed ticket. It stays out of **Decisions so far**, which records the route actually walked — a scope boundary isn't a step on it.

## Invocation

Two modes. Either way, **never resolve more than one ticket per session** — with the exception of research tickets.

### Chart the map

User invokes with a loose idea.

1. **Name the destination.** Run a `/grilling` and `/domain-modeling` session to pin down what this map is finding its way to — the spec, decision, or change. The destination fixes the scope, so it's settled first.
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. **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

User invokes with a map (URL or number). A ticket is **optional** — without one, you pick the next decision, not the user.

1. Load the **map** — the low-res view, not every ticket body.
2. Choose the ticket. If the user named one, use it. Otherwise take the first frontier ticket in order. **Claim it**: assign it to yourself before any work.
3. Resolve it — **zoom as needed**: fetch the full body of any related or closed ticket on demand; invoke the skills the `## Notes` block names. If in doubt, use `/grilling` and `/domain-modeling`.
4. Record the resolution: post the answer as a **resolution comment**, **close** the issue, and **append a context pointer** to the map's Decisions-so-far.
5. Add newly-surfaced tickets (create-then-wire); graduate any fog the answer has made specifiable, clearing each graduated patch from **Not yet specified** so it lives only as its new ticket. If the answer reveals a ticket — this one or another — sits beyond the destination, **rule it out of scope** rather than resolving it on the route. If the decision invalidates other parts of the map, update or delete those tickets.

The user may run unblocked tickets in parallel, so expect other sessions to be editing the tracker concurrently.