Thariq Shihipar, a member of Anthropic’s technical staff, offers a field guide for finding the context an agent needs before and during implementation:
The difference between the map and the territory is what I call unknowns. When Claude runs into an unknown, it needs to make a decision based on its best guess of what I want. The more work being done, the more unknowns Claude might run into.
Claude Fable is the first model where I find the quality of the work is bottlenecked by my ability to clarify its unknowns.
Importantly, just planning ahead isn’t always enough. You can find unknowns deep in implementation, or your unknowns may point you to the fact that you should actually be solving the problem in a different way altogether.
The design-specific version is tacit judgment: criteria that become visible only after there is something concrete to react to. Shihipar’s recommendation is to use prototypes to surface those criteria while changing direction is still cheap.
When I’m working in an area with a lot of unknown knowns, involving criteria I only know to define when I see it, I like to ask Claude to brainstorm and prototype with me.
It’s extremely valuable to identify and verbalize unknown knowns early during prototyping, because finding them out during implementation can be (relatively) expensive. Small changes in a feature or spec can cause drastically different implementations in code, and it can be more difficult for your agent to revert previous changes.
For example, you may just want to see how a button added to a frame looks without having to wire up a backend route or maintaining additional state in the frontend.
This makes exploration part of specifying the work. The prototype helps the designer discover what the brief could not yet contain, while implementation notes preserve the choices that emerge after the plan meets the code.
The better models get, the more you can achieve with the right approach. When a long-horizon task comes back wrong, it’s likely you need to spend more time defining your unknowns or creating an implementation plan that allows for you and Claude to adapt through them.
Every explainer, brainstorm, interview, prototype, and reference is a cheap way to find out what you didn’t know before it gets expensive to fix.
