Cognitive Approaches | UPG Reference

plan

Plan

“what should I build next?”

The path of arrival to "what should I build next?". Plan engages a region by surveying its entity coverage against canonical expectations and surfacing the missing scaffolding: the entities a healthy region carries that this graph does not. Cartographic sense: you are walking the coastline of a region and noting where the contour is incomplete, not deciding a strategy. Frameworks like Now/Next/Later, MoSCoW, and Wardley Mapping live within Plan as the named techniques for organising the gap-filling sequence.

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inspect

Inspect

“what's broken?”

The path of arrival to "what's broken?". Inspect engages a region or a set of entities by running canonical health checks (anti-pattern audits, drift reports, lint passes) and emitting a structured violation list with severity, kind, target entity, description, and fix hint. Cartographic sense: you are surveying the coastline for hazards before approach; the violations are the rocks marked on the chart. The named techniques inside Inspect are the audit catalogues themselves (`UPG_ANTI_PATTERNS` and the lint passes built on the structural rules).

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prioritise

Prioritise

“what's most important?”

The path of arrival to "what's most important?". Prioritise engages an explicit candidate set (entity ids the caller passes in) and ranks it by an explicit framework: RICE, Kano, MoSCoW. The framework_id is required because prioritisation without a declared scoring lens is incoherent. Cartographic sense: you have a set of charted destinations and you are computing the order of arrival from a chosen vantage. Different frameworks weight the same candidate set differently; the approach delegates the actual ranking math to the named technique (the framework definition).

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trace

Trace

“walk a meaningful path through existing graph”

The path of arrival to "walk a meaningful path through existing graph". Trace engages an anchor entity and follows a path expressed as a UPGEntityType[] shorthand. Example: `["persona", "job", "feature"]` walks persona→job→feature using the canonical edge for each pair (resolved via `resolve_edge_for_pair`). An optional `edges_override` array selects non-canonical edges per hop when a pair has multiple resolutions. Cartographic sense: you are tracing a route across charted terrain; anchor is the departure, path is the heading sequence, the canonical edges are the roads. No DSL invented; the shorthand IS the path expression.

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reflect

Reflect

“what should I be questioning?”

The path of arrival to "what should I be questioning?". Reflect engages an optional scope (region, entity, or `null` for the whole graph) and emits structured prompts a thinker should consider: assumptions to test, alternatives to weigh, blind-spots to surface, load-bearing claims to verify. Mode is optional; absence is open reflection. Cartographic sense: before approaching the coastline, you are asking which features of your chart you have not actually verified; the prompts mark the parts of the map that may be conjecture. Retrospective and Build-Measure-Learn are the named reflective techniques in the canonical surface.

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