Finding-Unknowns Skills

11 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, Kimi Code CLI (Kimi K3), or any agent that reads the agentskills.io SKILL.md format.

Three of them come from his follow-up, The new rules of context engineering for Claude 5 generation models, which works one layer up: not the unknowns in a single prompt, but the ones baked into the context every prompt inherits.

Community project. Distilled, with attribution, from public essays 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

And three for the context itself

The eight above work on one task at a time. These three work on the instructions your agent carries into every task — the layer where Anthropic deleted 80% of Claude Code's system prompt with no measurable loss.

progressive-disclosure ships with disable-model-invocation: true. In Claude Code that makes it user-invoked only — it stays out of the model's reach and costs nothing in your context window until you type its name. Codex ignores the flag (verified on v0.143: the skill and its description still load into the model-visible prompt), so treat it as a normal model-invoked skill there.

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 11 skills first, or --skill blindspot-pass to install just one. (Discoverable on skills.sh.)

As a Claude Code plugin (all 11 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, copy guidance/finding-unknowns.md into your project root as CLAUDE.md (Claude Code) or AGENTS.md (Codex and other AGENTS.md-reading agents), or append it to your existing one.

Moved in v1.2.0: this file used to be the repo's own CLAUDE.md. Root CLAUDE.md/AGENTS.md now hold gotchas for maintaining this repo, which is what those files are for — general methodology in a file meant for repo-specific context is exactly the pattern context-audit flags.

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. (Re-verified at v1.2.0 with skills@1.5.20: the CLI discovers all 11 skills in this repo, and their descriptions, via --list.)

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/

Prefer a managed bundle? Codex also installs the whole set as a plugin:

codex plugin marketplace add Neeeophytee/finding-unknowns-skills
codex plugin add finding-unknowns@finding-unknowns

Codex detects skill changes automatically. For the passive-guidance version, copy guidance/finding-unknowns.md into your project root as AGENTS.md — Codex reads it before doing any work. Re-tested with Codex CLI v0.143.0 at v1.3.0: both routes load all 11 skills into the model-visible prompt (verify with codex debug prompt-input). Codex does not honour disable-model-invocation, so progressive-disclosure is model-reachable there. Full details and receipts: INSTALL-CODEX.md. (Paths per the Codex skills docs.)

Use in Hermes Agent

These are skills, not a Python plugin, so install them via Hermes's skills system, not hermes plugins install. Clone the repo and point Hermes at it in ~/.hermes/config.yaml:

skills:
  external_dirs:
    - ~/finding-unknowns-skills/skills

All 11 skills then register and appear on every Hermes surface. Verified live on Hermes Agent v0.15.1: all 11 load and show enabled in hermes skills list. Single-skill installs and full receipts: INSTALL-HERMES.md.

Use in Kimi Code CLI (Kimi K3)

Kimi Code CLI auto-discovers SKILL.md skills at startup and injects their names and trigger descriptions into the system prompt — the same mechanism as Claude Code and Codex. Its search paths include ~/.claude/skills/, ~/.codex/skills/, and ~/.agents/skills/, so if you already installed these skills for Claude Code, Codex, or via npx skills add, Kimi K3 sees them with zero extra steps. Fresh install into Kimi's own location:

git clone https://github.com/Neeeophytee/finding-unknowns-skills
cp -r finding-unknowns-skills/skills/* ~/.kimi/skills/           # all projects
# or, per project:  cp -r finding-unknowns-skills/skills/* your-repo/.kimi/skills/

Project-level paths (.kimi/skills/, .claude/skills/, .codex/skills/, .agents/skills/) resolve from the nearest .git root; add custom locations with --skills-dir or extra_skill_dirs. (Paths per the Kimi Code CLI skills docs.)

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
• Your agent ignores its own instructions, or your CLAUDE.md has grown past reading → context-audit
• You're building a tool, MCP server, or script an agent will call → agent-interface-design
• One skill or spec got too long to keep loading in full → /progressive-disclosure (type it; it won't fire on its own)

Invoking a skill on each agent

Same skills, different invocation syntax per agent. The model reaches them on its own from the descriptions; this is how you trigger one by hand:

progressive-disclosure is user-invoked in Claude Code only — elsewhere it behaves as a normal model-invoked skill (see the per-agent notes above).

See EXAMPLES.md for real prompts.

Credit

The techniques come from two essays by Thariq Shihipar:

• A Field Guide to Fable: Finding Your Unknowns — the unknowns framing and the eight task-level skills. Essay and companion artifacts. Coverage: The Decoder.
• The new rules of context engineering for Claude 5 generation models — the three context-level skills: rules give way to judgement, examples to interface design, upfront loading to progressive disclosure.

This repo distills them into the SKILL.md format with original instruction text. Read the essays for the full reasoning, including the Fable 5 launch-video story that motivates the first.

License

MIT for the skill text in this repo. The underlying techniques belong to their author; attribution above.

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