zj-wayfinder

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. This skill charts the way as a shared map on the repo's issue tracker, then works its decision tickets — questions whose resolution is a decision, not slices of a build to execute — one at a time until the route is clear.

The destination varies per effort, and naming it is the first act of charting — it shapes every ticket. It might be a spec to hand off and iterate on, a decision to lock before planning starts, or a change made in place like a data-structure migration. The map is domain-agnostic — engineering work, course content, whatever fits the shape.

Plan, don't do

Wayfinder is planning by default: each ticket resolves a decision, and the map is done when the way is clear — nothing left to decide before someone goes and does the thing. 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. An effort can override this in its Notes — carrying execution into the map itself — but absent that, produce decisions, not deliverables.

Carrier modes

Wayfinder is one skill with two switchable carriers — the planning logic is identical; only the physical home of the map, tickets, blocking, and frontier changes. Pick by scenario, not preference:

• Tracker mode (teamwork). The map and its child tickets live on the repo's issue tracker (GitHub/GitLab/…). Wins: multi-agent concurrency via claim + native blocking edges, and the human sees the frontier rendered in the tracker's own UI. Needs: a configured tracker — run /zj-agents-init if none is provided.
• Local mode (self-contained). The entire map — Destination, Notes, Decisions-so-far, Not-yet-specified, Out-of-scope, and the decision tickets — lives in a single local markdown file (the "local-markdown tracker"). Wins: context-complete (the human sees the whole map in one session), offline, zero external dependency, single-writer-simple. This is the default when no tracker is configured.

Same mental model either way. Both modes expose the same primitives — destination, notes, decisions, fog, scope, and tickets with blocking edges + a frontier. So migrating from local exploration to teamwork (or back) changes the carrier, not the cognition: the map you charted locally drops onto a tracker without re-deciding anything.

This dual-mode design is the planning half of a deliberate pairing with zj-roadmap-driven (see Combining with zj-roadmap-driven): wayfinder owns planning in either carrier; roadmap-driven owns tracking, with the same two-mode shape.