cartographerlisted

The map is not the territory. The **map** is what you hand the agent — prompts, specs, context, this file. The **territory** is where the work actually lands: the codebase, the constraints, the taste nobody wrote down. The gap between them is **unknowns**, and every unknown the agent hits, it resolves by guessing at what you wanted. For small work you can absorb the guesses. For work too big to hold in one session, you can't — the guesses compound, and the thread dies with the context window. This skill keeps one artifact, `MAP.md`, that survives sessions: it names where you're going, holds the unknowns you can phrase and the ones you can only sense, and stays open through implementation so unknowns found late come back to the map rather than silently into the diff. The destination varies. A spec to hand off, a decision to lock, a change made in place like a data migration. Naming it is the first act, because it fixes scope and everything else is judged against it. The shape is domain-agnostic — engineering, writing, course design, whatever fits. ## The four kinds of unknown Everything on the map is one of these. Knowing which you're holding tells you what move to make. | | You know it's there | You don't | |---|---|---| | **You can state it** | **Known known** — it's in the spec. Write it in **Notes** or the destination and stop thinking about it. | **Unknown known** — obvious to you, never written down. You'd recognize it instantly if you saw it violated. | | **You can