Matt Pocock shipped /wayfinder this week, the newest skill in his "AI Skills for Real Engineers" repo — now at 220,000 GitHub stars. The skill addresses a specific failure: agents running overnight on long-horizon tasks that nobody fully understood at kick-off. The core idea: move planning from the context window onto the issue tracker.
The problem isn't hallucination in the usual LLM sense. It's session-boundary rot. When Pocock ran agents on multi-day projects, the planning stage became the bottleneck. He had to manually track token depth, decide what carried forward into the next session, and maintain coherent project state across context resets. /wayfinder externalises that state into a map — a single issue on the repo's tracker labeled wayfinder:map. The map holds every decision already made as child issues (tickets). The map is an index, not a store: each decision lives in exactly one ticket and the map links to it.
Each ticket sizes to one 100K-token agent session. The skill defines four ticket types: grilling (structured interview to resolve a decision), prototype (cheap concrete artifact), research (background investigation as a parallel subagent), and task (anything the agent can't do). A session claims a ticket by assigning it before work begins; concurrent sessions skip claimed tickets. Blocking edges use the tracker's native dependency links. The frontier — open, unblocked, unclaimed tickets — is visible in the tracker UI without opening the map. Supported backends: GitHub Issues, GitLab, and local markdown.
| Ticket Type | Purpose | Session Behaviour |
|---|---|---|
| grilling | Structured interview to resolve a specific decision | One 100K-token session; agent asks questions, records answer, closes ticket |
| prototype | Produce a cheap, concrete artifact to inform a decision | One 100K-token session; output is the artifact, not a report |
| research | Background investigation as a parallel subagent | Exception to one-session rule: multiple research subagents fire concurrently |
| task | Any action the agent cannot perform (human-only or blocked) | Claimed but completed externally; session moves to next frontier ticket |
The "fog of war" framing does operational work, not metaphorical decoration. Pocock describes the planning problem as Warcraft III-style map exploration: each resolved decision reveals new decisions. He emphasizes vocabulary as operational anchor: "leading words" (map, ticket, frontier) give agents consistent reference points across sessions. When the same concept gets different names in different parts of the prompt, he says, "you get strange behavior." The rename from /decision-mapping to /wayfinder reflected this: the old name was "jargony and inaccurate — only one ticket type is actually a decision."
The full pipeline is /wayfinder → /to-spec → /to-tickets → /implement. Wayfinder closes when the route is clear, meaning no open decision tickets remain. /to-spec then collapses linked decisions into one spec artifact; /to-tickets slices it into tracer-bullet implementation tickets with blocking edges. Skipping /to-spec and going straight to /implement is possible on small efforts but "throws the linked detail away" on larger ones. Research tickets are the exception to the one-session-per-ticket rule: the charting session fires a /research subagent for each in parallel.
Parallel ticket work is technically supported but the practical ceiling is low. Users running two grilling tickets simultaneously get asked in one session a question they just answered in the other, because sessions share no context. One-at-a-time is the recommended default until agents can read sibling session state. One reported gap: an agent selected among three UI variations it had built and closed the ticket without human review.
The underlying shift is architectural: decision tickets carry decisions out of sessions the same way context files carry knowledge in. Wayfinder abandons the session as the unit of work and moves the source of truth to the tracker. The bet is that the issue tracker is a more reliable shared state than the context window.