find-unknowns

The map is not the territory. Your prompt, your plan, your mental model — that's the map. The codebase, the domain, the real constraints — that's the territory. The gap between them is your unknowns, and on a capable model the work is bottlenecked less by the model's ability and more by your ability to surface those unknowns before they get expensive. Every explainer, brainstorm, interview, and quiz is a cheap way to find out what you didn't know — before it costs you a bad implementation to find out the hard way.

Name the four unknowns

When you bring a problem, it breaks down four ways. Naming which kind you're short on tells you which move to reach for: