Ryan Hunter · the card
The Agency Kernel
Ten moves and five plain prompts that turn "I'm stuck" into the next thing to try.
The ten operators moves you can run on almost any situation
- 01
OrientA
Form a usable model of "where am I, and what's happening?"
- 02
Value
Distinguish what I care about and what I'd prefer.
- 03
ImagineB
Represent states that don't exist yet.
- 04
CausalizeC
Ask what would have to become true for that.
- 05
Intervene
Turn one part of the causal frontier into an actual attempt.
- 06
ObserveD
Distinguish what happened from what I hoped would happen.
- 07
Update
Change the model or the intervention rather than defend the story.
- 08
Acquire decodersE
When blocked by ignorance: learn, ask, research, recruit, tool up.
- 09
Persist
Keep enough state that an interruption doesn't reset the whole process.
- 10
Recurse
Apply the same process to the limitations of the process itself.
Five plain prompts that call them paste into ChatGPT or Claude, then add your situation
- A
Don't know what to ask? → Orient
“I don't know enough about this problem to know what questions matter. Help me map the space first.”
- B
Don't know what you want? → Imagine
“Help me distinguish my current state, what feels wrong, and several possible better states without choosing for me.”
- C
Don't know how to proceed? → Causalize
“Represent the outcome causally and stop decomposition when we reach something I can actually do.”
- D
Don't know if the advice worked? → Observe
“What observable evidence would discriminate between these hypotheses?”
- E
Don't understand something? → Acquire decoders
“Tell me what prerequisite decoder I'm missing.”
The goal: the agency ignition threshold
Below it, someone else has to keep restarting your loop: you get stuck and stay stuck (an agent hallucinates or stops). Above it, you can turn most kinds of blockage into another solvable problem: 'I don't know how' → 'what would let me learn how?' → 'who or what can teach me?'. Self-bootstrapping agency: a system that increasingly repairs its own inability to proceed. You never needed Japanese; you needed the ability to acquire a temporary bridge across Japanese.