discovery

# Discovery — surface hidden constraints first The biggest cause of bad agent output is missing context. Before locking in a decision, enumerate what you don't know and surface it. ## The 7 discovery dimensions For any non-trivial request, walk through these and record findings in the report's "Context" section: ### 1. Who depends on this? - What other services / teams consume the thing you're changing? - Are there public consumers (open API, OSS users)? - Is there a deprecation path if you break compatibility? Grep for: `grep -rE "import.*<your-module>|require.*<your-module>"` in the repo and any sibling repos you have access to. ### 2. What's the scale today, what's it in 6 months? - Current traffic: requests/sec, queries/sec, MB/day, daily-active-users - Storage: rows in main tables, size on disk - Cost: monthly LLM spend, infra spend - 6-month projection: linear? exponential? unknown? If unknown, write: "scale unknown — request from user before proceeding." ### 3. What MUST not change? - Existing API contracts (backward compatibility window) - Database schema columns referenced by reporting / BI - File formats consumed by other tools - Regulatory commitments (audit log retention, SLA RPO/RTO) ### 4. What's the budget? - Monthly cost ceiling (LLM + infra) - Headcount: 1-person task vs cross-team effort - Calendar: "must ship by X" vs "best by Y" If unstated, default to "small project_size, 1-engineer-week, <$200/mo budget." Surface this default in the report ...