Maintained by 泊舟 Bozhou — I write about AI and agentic coding on X, follow me at x.com/bozhou_ai.
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A single CLAUDE.md file that turns Thariq's (Anthropic) field guide — A Field Guide to Fable: Finding Your Unknowns — into behavioral guidelines for Claude Code.
From Thariq's article:
Working with Claude Fable 5 keeps re-teaching me an old lesson: the map is not the territory.
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.
Fable is the first model where I find the quality of the work is bottlenecked by my ability to clarify its unknowns.
Your prompt is a map. The codebase is the territory. Everything you didn't say — and everything you didn't know to say — is an unknown, and every unknown forces Claude to guess. Accumulated wrong guesses are how long tasks go badly off course.
Make Claude an active partner in discovering your unknowns, at every stage:
| Technique | Stage | Uncovers |
|---|---|---|
| Blindspot Pass | Pre-implementation | Unknown unknowns |
| Brainstorm & Prototype | Pre-implementation | Unknown knowns |
| Interview | Pre-implementation | Known unknowns |
| References | Pre-implementation | What you can't put into words |
| Implementation Plan | Pre-implementation | Decisions you'll want to tweak |
| Implementation Notes | During implementation | Deviations from the plan |
| Explainer & Quiz | Post-implementation | What actually changed |
- Known knowns — what's in your prompt.
- Known unknowns — what you know you haven't figured out yet.
- Unknown knowns — what's so obvious you'd never write it down, but you'd recognize it if you saw it.
- Unknown unknowns — what you haven't considered at all.
The guidelines instruct Claude to surface the last three instead of silently guessing through them.
Global rules (recommended) — applies to every Claude Code session:
echo "" >> ~/.claude/CLAUDE.md
curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/bozhouDev/finding-unknowns-skills/main/CLAUDE.md >> ~/.claude/CLAUDE.mdPer-project — append to the project's CLAUDE.md:
echo "" >> CLAUDE.md
curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/bozhouDev/finding-unknowns-skills/main/CLAUDE.md >> CLAUDE.mdFrom Thariq:
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.
When a long-horizon task comes back wrong, it's usually not the model — it's undefined unknowns. Don't just retry; go back and define them.
- Claude asks one architecture-changing question instead of five trivial ones.
- Claude offers mock prototypes before touching real code when the direction is fuzzy.
- Deviations from the plan show up in
implementation-notes.mdinstead of silently in the diff. - You can pass the quiz about a big change before you merge it.
These guidelines bias toward discovery over speed. For trivial tasks (typo-level fixes), Claude is told to use judgment and skip the ceremony.
- Original methodology: Thariq (@trq212), Anthropic — A Field Guide to Fable: Finding Your Unknowns
- Repo structure inspired by andrej-karpathy-skills
- Curated and maintained by 泊舟 Bozhou
MIT