mattpocock-wayfinder
mattpocock/wayfinder
Plan work too big for one session as a map of decision tickets on your issue tracker, resolved one per session.
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. It plans; it does not build.
Who it is for
Efforts where you cannot yet see the route: migrations, new products, anything with “fog”.
What you get
One map issue labelled wayfinder:map, child tickets with native blocking, and a decision log that grows a line per session.
Charge At The Destination And You Get Lost
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.
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.
Latent Space interviewed Matt about it; he shared the breakdown on 20 Aug 2026 (327 likes). Their post describes it as designed for the “fog of war”.
The Map Is An Index; Each Decision Lives In One Ticket
Map
The map is an index, not a store.
Ticket size
Its body is the question, sized to one 100K token agent session
Frontier
the frontier is the open, unblocked, unclaimed children, the edge of the known.
Fog vs ticket
The test is whether you can state the question precisely now, _not_ whether you can answer it now.
Claim
That assignee _is_ the claim: an open, unassigned ticket is unclaimed.
Names
A wall of #42, #43, #44 is illegible; names read at a glance.
## Destination ## Notes ## Decisions so far - [<closed ticket title>](link): <one-line gist of the answer> ## Not yet specified ## Out of scope
The map body sections (abridged from wayfinder/SKILL.md).
Two Modes, Four Ticket Types, Three Backends
Click a part. Quotes are checked against the file named under each.
Lauren Tan Suggests Mixing It With pstack
From the stream with Matt, auto transcript, verbatim (it hears “wayfinder” as “Wfinder” and “poteto” as “potato”).
“Combine Wfinder with potato mode and make your own custom mode, right?”Lauren Tan (poteto), stream with Matt Pocock, 1:04:16
“someone might find a lot of success combining, you know, like your grill me with docs, uh, or wayfinder skill with some of the execution skills in Pstack as an example.”Lauren Tan (poteto), stream with Matt Pocock, 1:01:54
Read These Before You Chart
From reading every file at 5beb35b. No scripts ship.
Gap Two answers for “no tracker”
The same paragraph says If not, tell the user to run /setup-matt-pocock-skills. and then If no tracker has been provided, default to the local-markdown tracker. Pick one when you adapt it.
Cost GitLab free tier
No native blocking, so the frontier is not visible in the GitLab UI; the skill falls back to a text line.
Gap Names its siblings by Skill tool
Research, prototype, grilling and domain-modeling must be installed too, or ticket types silently degrade.
Copy No triage labels on decision tickets
wayfinder: labels are the only labels a map and its tickets carry, never a triage label like ready-for-agent
Cost Plans, not deliverables
When the map is done you still need a spec and tickets. That is what to-spec and to-tickets are for.
Wayfinder Plans Across Sessions; pstack Executes Inside One
| pstack skill | What pstack says it does | How it pairs |
|---|---|---|
poteto-mode | “poteto's agent style for concise, detailed responses” | Lauren’s own suggestion: fold wayfinder into a custom mode. |
figure-it-out | “Design an auditable playbook when no narrower one fits” | The single-session cousin: use it when the fog fits in one context. |
show-me-your-work | “Keep a reviewable decision trail for long-running” | A per-session trail; wayfinder’s Decisions so far is the cross-session one. |
swarm | “Fan out N parallel workers, drain them, and return one report.” | Run several unblocked frontier tickets at once. |
principle-guard-the-context-window | “Apply when context is filling up” | The same instinct as one 100K-token ticket per session. |
Then Turn The Map Into A Spec
- skills/engineering/wayfinder/SKILL.md
- skills/engineering/setup-matt-pocock-skills/issue-tracker-github.md
- skills/engineering/setup-matt-pocock-skills/issue-tracker-gitlab.md
- skills/engineering/setup-matt-pocock-skills/issue-tracker-local.md
- Matt on the Latent Space breakdown
- mattpocock/grill-with-docs: the pair every grilling ticket loads
- mattpocock/to-spec → to-tickets: what comes after the map
- github.com/mattpocock/skills: the repo and its README
- skills.sh/mattpocock/skills: install counts per skill
- Inside pstack: the pstack explainer on this site
- Matt Pocock with poteto, live: the stream quoted here