wayfinder

Cross-cutting step, before/alongside plan (4): for uncertainty that goes beyond the scope of an already estimable story. breakdown (existing skill) splits a framed story into 1h tasks; wayfinder handles a piece of work whose final shape isn't known yet.

When

As soon as a piece of work is too big/uncertain for one session, and its complete breakdown can't be known in advance (progressive migration, rework that sharpens as it goes): never for an already-framed story (that's breakdown).

Steps

1. Parent ticket: the destination, not the detailed path

1. Destination: where we want to end up, in one sentence, even if the exact path isn't known yet.
2. Notes: free-form context that accumulates as things progress.
3. Decisions already taken: what is settled and no longer up for discussion.
4. Not specified yet: the grey areas identified but unresolved, explicitly listed, never implicit.
5. Out of scope: what we chose not to do, so a child ticket doesn't drift into it later.

2. Typed child tickets

1. Research: clear an unknown before being able to move forward (no code deliverable).
2. Prototype: check that an approach works, throwaway if needed.
3. Grilling: precisely frame an area that's still unclear (close to spec).
4. Task: concrete, framed work, ready to execute.
5. Every child is linked to the parent by a native tracker dependency (not a plain text link) so the tool can visualise what is "frontier" (unblocked, takeable now) vs blocked waiting on another ticket.

3. One session = one ticket resolved

1. We never work on several child tickets at the same time in the same session: consistent with one task per worktree, closed after the merge.
2. The session's report names, per ticket, its outcome, the evidence and any unresolved blocker (skills/dispatch-parallel, supervision rules).
3. At the end of a session, the parent ticket is updated (notes, decisions, what moved from "not specified yet" to "decided").

Output / checkpoint

A parent Jira ticket with the five sections filled in, typed child tickets created as we go (not all at once at the start: only what has been identified), linked by native blocking dependencies.

Guardrails

Don't try to break the whole piece of work down at the start of the project: wayfinder explicitly accepts that the complete breakdown isn't known in advance, unlike plan/breakdown. Don't let the parent ticket become an unmaintained catch-all: every session updates it.

Origin

Rewrite of the wayfinder skill from a recognised market skill author: the parent ticket structure (5 sections) and the 4 child ticket types are taken as-is, adapted to Jira usage (instead of the original generic tracker) and explicitly distinguished from the already existing breakdown.