What's this about?
The first new Latent Space episode since August 11, and the start of a series examining individual skills. This one covers Matt Pocock's `/wayfinder` skill, designed for "the fog of war" — the situation where you need to figure out a project but the end state isn't clear yet. swyx's framing: by total views Matt is now the top AI Engineer speaker in the conference's history and arguably one of the best skills experts in the world; his `/grill-me` has propagated all the way up to Satya Nadella, and `/wayfinder` is "grill-me for grill-me" — for when you don't yet know what you don't know and need to orchestrate research.
What exactly is a "fog of war" project?
Most tooling assumes you know what you're building and need help building it. The harder situation is earlier: you have a goal and no map — unfamiliar domain, unclear constraints, no idea which questions matter. That's where people flounder, because you can't plan what you can't see, and asking an agent to "help" produces confident output about the wrong thing. A skill for this can't supply answers; it has to structure the search — deciding what to investigate first, what would change your mind, and when you know enough to commit.
Why is this worth noticing?
- A podcast series about individual skills is a genre marker. Skills have gone from a feature to shareable artifacts with recognized experts, in roughly a month.
- "grill-me for grill-me" is the useful description. `/grill-me` interrogates you until the agent understands your intent; `/wayfinder` applies that recursively to the situation where you don't know your own intent yet.
- It breaks a ten-day drought. Latent Space and Dwarkesh had published nothing since August 11, leaving only AI-generated daily shows in the podcast feeds.