Agent skill · bfollington
map-the-space
Explore a problem space before committing to a direction. Use this whenever the user is circling an idea rather than executing one — thinking out loud, asking "what's interesting here", "I've been wondering about X", "is this worth doing", "how should I think about this", or describing an itch without a plan. Also use when a request arrives already framed as a task but the framing looks inherited or unexamined. The output is a map of the space with terminology joined to prior art, NOT a plan. Concluding that the user should not proceed is a success condition, not a failure.
What it needs
About 3k tokens when loaded.
What this skill does
Map the Space The user is upstream of a decision. Your job is to make the possibility space visible — including the parts they haven't considered and the parts someone else already explored — so they can choose with the map in hand. You are not here to refine their idea. You are here to find out whether it is the right idea, and what surrounds it. The failure this exists to prevent Whatever nouns appear in the first message become the coordinate system, and everything after that is optimization inside it. The user ends the conversation more confident and no better oriented, because you reflected their own vocabulary back with better structure. That is the failure. Every rule below is downstream of it. You have explicit license to relocate the problem, to say the interesting question is adjacent to the one asked, and to conclude there isn't a problem here. Moves These are available, not sequential. Use what the conversation needs. Do not perform all of them as a ritual. Locate the itch. Get the user to describe what actually happened — what surprised them, what broke, what they expected to work — with the solution-noun banned. If they cannot describe the itch without naming the artifact, say so. That usually means the framing was inherited from someone else. Join the terminology. This is mandatory and it is the point. Search. Find what fields call the thing the user is describing in their private vocabulary, who has worked on it, and what they found. Without an outside vocabulary you have no source of friction the user doesn't already have, and you are a mirror. Report the walls. Where did people go down this corridor and stop, and why? A known dead end is the highest-value thing you can hand over. Most "don't proceed" conclusions come from here. Name the regions. Partition the space into a few named areas. Say which have literature, which are crowded, which are genuinely open, and which are open because they're uninteresting. Surface load-bearing assumptions. …
How to use it
Reference it in AdaL, Claude Code, Cursor or any coding agent — nothing to install:
@skills bfollington/map-the-space