Blindspot

Blindspot

The work file, the prompt, the glossary — all map. The codebase, its history, its real constraints — territory. The gap between them is the unknowns, and an unknown left unfound doesn't stay unfound: the diff review finds it, or production does.

Sort any unknown into one of four kinds; the flow already mines three:

Kind	What it is	Who finds it
Known knowns	Already written down	The work file carries them
Known unknowns	Questions you know are open	Wonder settles or parks them
Unknown knowns	Obvious to the user, never said	The interview extracts them
Unknown unknowns	On nobody's question list	Only the territory can surface them — this skill

An interview can't reach the fourth kind: it only asks questions someone thought to ask. This skill owns three moves for the moments the map is furthest from the territory. Each feeds a stage; none replaces one.

Move 1 — the territory pass (before the work)

When work enters an area the user names as unfamiliar, when interview answers keep coming back "I don't know", or when a whole discipline nobody on the work has judgment in walks in (a new subsystem, a new domain entirely) — walk the territory before anyone writes the brief.

Read only — the code, its tests, its docs, and its history (log and blame of the area; reverted commits and bug-fix clusters are where it bit last time). Spawn the pass as a fresh subagent on a frontier-tier model — the session's main model or better, never a cheaper one. Hunting unknown unknowns is judgment, not reading: a cheap model reliably collects the potholes that are written down and then mis-calls the ones that aren't — measured twice (a greenfield pass that recommended the exact render path the project's fixed constraint forbade, corrected only by two later frontier stages; a 9/10-scored pass whose recommendations included quietly disabling a safety net). The report anchors every stage after it; this is the wrong place to save money. The subagent is still worth it for the fresh context — the main session consumes the report instead of re-walking the files. Then report four things, nothing else:

1. Questions you didn't know to ask — decision points the territory forces that the ask never mentions. Each arrives as a question with your recommended answer, same discipline as the interview.
2. What "good" looks like here — the conventions, invariants, and quality bars this area already enforces; what a reviewer of this area would reject without discussion.
3. Potholes — where this area has bitten before, with the evidence: the reverted commit, the FIXME cluster, the test named after a bug. No history of bites? Say so — potholes are found, never manufactured.
4. A sharper ask — the user's request rewritten with the found unknowns settled or explicitly parked. Offer it back: "this is what I'd put in the brief."

Before offering any of it, collide your recommended answers with your own findings: a recommendation that quietly disables a safety net you just reported as a pothole, or divides money you just said must not be divided, is the pass contradicting itself — and it reads authoritative precisely because the rest of the report is right.

Route the findings where they live: questions join the interview (/wonder), a term that wobbled goes to the domain-glossary skill, potholes become attack material for /discern, the sharper ask goes into the work file. Findings carry their evidence (the commit, the file, the test name) so consuming stages cite the report instead of re-exploring — a pass that gets re-verified file by file cost double and bought nothing. The pass writes no code and checks no gate — it exists so the stages that do have real material.

Move 2 — teach before judging (at a choice)

Watch for it whenever the user is confirming a choice — options from Invention, Discernment's recommendation, prototype directions. "Whichever you think", "they all look fine", an outright "I can't tell": that isn't agreement, it's a judgment gap. A confirmation from someone who can't evaluate the choice is an unknown wearing an approval, and it comes back later as "this isn't what I wanted."

Name the dimensions along which the options actually differ. Teach just enough to hold an opinion — with material from this territory: a side-by-side, a before/after, the two lines that differ — not a lecture on the field. Then re-present the choice.

If the user can judge now, their confirmation means something — record it. If they still can't, that is a delegated decision: record your pick as assumed: (the genius-file skill owns the idiom) instead of dressing it up as user-confirmed. An honest assumed: beats a hollow "sure, option A" — the returning reader knows to look at one; the other lies to them.

Move 3 — quiz the map (before acceptance)

Tenacity verifies the territory: tests run fresh, diff reviewed. Nothing verifies the user's map of it. Built work the user hasn't absorbed is next month's unknown knowns — decisions they now own and couldn't state.

When built work is about to be accepted — Tenacity's close-out offers this, and delegated or auto work all but demands it, the user having watched none of the build — summarize what actually changed at the behavior level (from the diff and the work file: what happens differently now, what they will have to live with), then quiz. A few questions, one per message, each aimed at a consequence — "an upload fails twice; what happens on the third try?" — never trivia like filenames or line counts.

A wrong answer is a finding about the map, not about the user: the explanation was thin or the change genuinely surprising. Repair the map — re-explain, or write the missing line into the work file or docs — then ask again. The quiz checks no gate; the work's evidence is Tenacity's job. Its finish line is the user answering clean — so they accept knowing what they accepted.

What this skill is not

• Not the interview. Wonder extracts what the user knows and never said; this skill surfaces what nobody knew. A territory-pass finding that needs a user decision becomes an interview question — Wonder's, not this skill's.
• Not review. Tenacity's reviewer judges the work against the brief; the quiz judges the user's map against the work. Either can fail while the other passes.
• Not divergence. Invention owns generating options; Move 2 only teaches how to choose among options that already exist.
• Not a stage. It has no gate and never sets stage:. It feeds the gates the stages own.