walk-the-job
GitHubWalk one person through one job in a product, quote what the product shows, and note where the job breaks. Use when asked to walk a flow, dogfood a feature, try an empty state or an error, say who it is for, research a fact the job depends on, criticise the writeup, or write the decision from what survived. Commands: walk, cast, trouble, research, critic, brief. The product supplies the words. Do not use for a PRD, a roadmap, lifecycle email, or account administration.
Install
npx skills add pixeltable/pixeltable --skill walk-the-job -g -y
SKILL.md
Frontmatter
{
"name": "walk-the-job",
"license": "MIT",
"metadata": {
"author": "Pierre Brunelle",
"version": "0.7.0"
},
"description": "Walk one person through one job in a product, quote what the product shows, and note where the job breaks. Use when asked to walk a flow, dogfood a feature, try an empty state or an error, say who it is for, research a fact the job depends on, criticise the writeup, or write the decision from what survived. Commands: walk, cast, trouble, research, critic, brief. The product supplies the words. Do not use for a PRD, a roadmap, lifecycle email, or account administration.\n"
}
Walk the job
Sit with one person while they try to do a job. You are the product manager. The product in front of you is the one that was built. Every word they follow is a word the product shows. They cannot see a sentence you wrote for them.
The commands share one job card. A later command keeps the person and the job, and reads the product again because the path may have moved.
A good product solves the problem this person arrived with. A great one, once that job is done, hands them a new set of problems, and those problems are now the product's. references/questions.md is the ten questions a brief has to answer, and the rule for the new problems. An open question stays open.
Commands
| Command | What it does | Reference |
|---|---|---|
walk |
Full session, from arrival until they finish or give up | references/walk.md |
cast |
The job card only | references/cast.md |
trouble |
The break: empty, wrong, wait, closed, return, undo | references/trouble.md |
research |
Facts outside the product that this job depends on, each with a source | references/research.md |
critic |
Attack the session or the brief. Change nothing | references/critic.md |
brief |
The decision, from the card and the facts that survived | references/brief.md |
Read the reference for the command before you start. Read references/card.md whenever the command uses the job card.
Routing:
- They named a command, or the ask is clearly one row of the table: run that command.
- They named rows from a session table: the second pass in references/walk.md.
- A short ask to walk, dogfood, or confirm the experience:
walk. - No command, and a product is open:
walk. - No product is open: ask which product and which job. Do not invent one.
- Two commands fit: ask once.
You may hand research to the lifecycle-researcher subagent and critic to the lifecycle-critic subagent. The reference is the same either way.
The job card
The card is lifecycle/job.md in the product's project. references/card.md is its shape.
If the file exists, use its person, job, done, and leave. If a command needs a card and the file is absent, write the card from the product and save the file. brief is the exception: with no card, it stops.
research and critic leave the product as they found it. critic leaves the job card as it found it. research writes the card only when the file is absent.
Change the product only when they asked you to fix what you find.
Shared rules
- One person. A second person leaves you with no single place the job stops.
- Quote the product. Name the file, the page, the command, or the screen.
- When two places disagree, keep both.
- A change names that place and the words to add, move, or remove.
- Drop a change that still fits if you swap in another product.
- references/floor.md is the picture of a writeup that looks finished and leaves nothing to point at. Read it before
walk,trouble,critic, andbrief. - references/questions.md is the ten questions. Read it before
walk,research,critic, andbrief.
Version History
- 2eca8e4 Current 2026-11-02 10:14
