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Wayfinding-Routing (Self-Orientation & Emergency Fallback Engine)

The Wayfinding-Routing skill (also known as survival-routing, dead-reckoning, pathfinder-routing, and celestial-routing) serves as the definitive navigation and emergency recovery framework for LLM agents.

It equips agents with proactive wayfinding heuristics during normal execution and emergency protocols when encountering context drift, recurring execution errors, failing APIs, or dead ends.

Synonym & Strategy Overview

| Synonym Strategy | Metaphor & Core Principle | Applied Use Case | | :--- | :--- | :--- | | wayfinding-routing (Primary) | Wayfinding / Spatial Orientation: Navigating without external GPS by reading signposts and environmental cues. | Primary navigation loop for sidecars, workflowhooker, and automation-self-care. | | survival-routing | Emergency Fallback & Self-Preservation: Circuit-breaking and graceful degradation when tools fail or loops form. | Emergency recovery when commands time out, fail repeatedly, or hit permission walls. | | dead-reckoning | Nautical Dead Reckoning (Koppelnavigation): Reconstructing exact state from step-by-step breadcrumbs without external status. | Tracking execution steps in scratch files or TODO.md to enable precise backtracking. | | pathfinder-routing | Scout / Pathfinder Trailblazing: Preflight scanning and paving paths for multi-agent teams. | Preflight inspection of directory trees, locks, and task dependencies. | | celestial-routing | Astronavigation: Aligning with immutable North-Star anchor documents when local context is noisy. | Fallback to CLAUDE.md, AGENTS.md, START.md when prompt instructions conflict. |

The 5 Core Emergency & Orientation Protocols

1. PROTOCOL-ANCHOR-RESET (North-Star Fallback / Celestial Routing)

• Trigger: Context drift, conflicting user instructions, or loss of orientation in long multi-turn sessions.
• Heuristic Rule: Stop free text generation. Clear transient assumptions. Re-read root anchor documents (CLAUDE.md, AGENTS.md, START.md). Reset goal state to the authoritative root directive before taking further action.

2. PROTOCOL-STOP-EXPLAIN (Rubber-Duck Reflection Loop)

• Trigger: A terminal command, file edit, or API request fails twice with an identical error.
• Heuristic Rule: Lock command execution. The agent MUST output a formal self-reflection before trying a 3rd attempt:

1. What exact error occurred in attempt 1 & 2?
2. Why did the previous diagnostic hypothesis fail?
3. What is the new alternative approach?

Execution is unlocked ONLY after writing this explicit justification.

3. PROTOCOL-GRACEFUL-DEGRADATION (Multi-Tiered Fallback Cascade)

• Trigger: Primary tool, MCP server, or external API is unavailable or returns errors.
• Heuristic Rule: Never fail abruptly or loop blindly. Step down through degradation tiers:
• Tier 1 (Optimal): Full Native API / MCP Tool
• Tier 2 (Fallback Tool): Local Python CLI / Script
• Tier 3 (Read-Only State): Direct file parsing (view_file / raw text)
• Tier 4 (Handoff): Present structured status report and open options to the user.

4. PROTOCOL-BREADCRUMB-BACKTRACK (Dead-Reckoning & Sackgassen-Erkennung)

• Trigger: A complex multi-step refactoring or workflow path hits an unresolvable block at step N.
• Heuristic Rule: Record breadcrumbs before making destructive changes. If a path fails:

1. Revert uncommitted changes (git checkout / restore state).
2. Jump back to the last clean breadcrumb checkpoint.
3. Mark the failed route as blocked in TODO.md.
4. Attempt alternative path B.

5. PROTOCOL-CIRCUIT-BREAKER (Notaus & Safe Exit)

• Trigger: Execution limits reached, infinite loop detected, or critical system lock error.
• Heuristic Rule: Execute emergency shutdown sequence:

1. Release all acquired file and git locks (python -m workflowhooker check).
2. Save current partial state to .SYNC/SURVIVAL_STATE.json or AUTOMATIONS-MEMORY.md.
3. Log incident in ANTIGRAVITY-LOG.txt.
4. Exit cleanly with actionable summary for the user or orchestrator.

Integration with automation-self-care & workflowhooker

wayfinding-routing provides the underlying navigation logic for:

• automation-self-care: Evaluates sidecar prompts against the 5 protocols to ensure self-healing capabilities.
• workflowhooker: Provides standard heuristics for step-by-step lock checking and breadcrumb recording.
• staircase-routing: Leverages PROTOCOL-ANCHOR-RESET for vertical directory navigation.