Scout

Distilled from Thariq's A Field Guide to Fable: Finding Your Unknowns.

Premise: the prompt and context are the map; the codebase and its real constraints are the territory. The gap between them is the user's unknowns, and work quality is bottlenecked by clarifying them — before, during, and after implementation. This skill is a toolkit, not a workflow: diagnose, pick one technique, run it inline. Produce no artifact beyond what the technique itself outputs.

Diagnose first

Before picking a technique, collect the user's starting point — experience with the domain, familiarity with this part of the codebase, where they are in their thought process. Every technique below degrades to generic output without it. Then place the unknowns:

Before implementation