guide-me
Bucket: workflow · Invocation: manual · /guide-me (direct Claude), /agent-os:guide-me (Claude plugin), or $guide-me (Codex)
Takes a developer who cannot yet state what they want to an approved goal and into the right planning workflow. Guide-me is the on-ramp, not the foundation: it owns no doctrine of its own and only shows the way through its two component skills and onward to where chart-work or shape-work begins. It writes no product code and no implementation issues.
The workflow composes two standalone skills:
- Understand — the questioning loop in understand-work runs until the goal stops moving or the developer says it is done.
- Explain — the plain-language gate in explain-work summarizes the task with no technical vocabulary. A challenge reopens the questioning at the misunderstood point; nothing continues without an approved summary.
The approved summary decides the route: several independent decision threads continue into chart-work, one bounded idea continues into shape-work, and something already small and clear becomes a ready-to-send direct request. The approval at the gate is the opt-in for that continuation — no second prompt.
The approved summary travels as a ## TLDR at the top of the artifact the next workflow creates, so every map or shape opens with what the work solves in plain language. Ruled-out directions and open questions travel with the handoff; nothing already answered is asked again.
Transcript: from vague to approved
Condensed illustration of the full chain.
User:
/guide-me Reports feel useless for our big customers and I
don't know what to do about it.
Agent:
What do big customers actually try to do in reports that fails today?
My guess from the support archive: they filter, then want the result
out of the app. Is the pain seeing the data, or taking it with them?
User:
Taking it with them. They paste screenshots into slides today.
Agent (plain-language summary, no technical vocabulary):
"Large customers can already find the numbers they need, but the only
way to take them along is a screenshot. This work gives them a proper
way to take a filtered result with them. It will not change what they
can see, only what they can carry away."
Approve, or challenge it?
User:
Approved.
Agent:
Continuing into chart-work — several open questions remain (what
format, who may export, what counts as large). The approved summary
goes in as the TLDR at the top of the map.