Practice - map your own constellation

Most people using Claude for multiple tasks are already running an informal constellation. The problem is the boundaries are invisible and the routing is ad hoc. This exercise makes the structure explicit.

What you are building

A constellation map: the crafts your work actually requires, the personas you trust for each, and the interfaces between them. Three to five plugins is the right size for most projects. Ten is the maximum. One is not a constellation.

Step 1 — List your crafts

Write down every distinct type of work your project requires. Be specific. "Writing" is not a craft — "product copy for a developer audience" is. "Design" is not a craft — "information architecture for a dashboard" is. "Strategy" is not a craft — "go-to-market sequencing for an enterprise product" is.

You are looking for domains where the vocabulary, the quality bar, and the failure modes are different enough that a single persona cannot hold all of them without slipping.

Step 2 — Map personas to crafts

For each craft, name one or two people — real or historical — whose work you trust as the quality bar. Do not name people you admire abstractly. Name people whose specific decisions you can point to. "Hemingway" is useful because you can open a page of his prose and ask: does this match. "A great writer" is not useful.

If you cannot name a person, your craft definition is still too vague.

Step 3 — Find the seams

Look at your list of crafts and ask: where does one end and the next begin? Who decides when the writer hands off to the publisher? Who resolves a conflict between the designer's brief and the engineer's constraints?

Draw those seams on paper or in a text file. The seams are where you need an orchestration persona — a Phil Jackson, not a craftsperson.

Step 4 — Write the interface

For each seam, write one sentence describing what artifact passes across it. "The author passes a finished draft. The publisher receives it and returns a format decision and a container specification." If you cannot write the sentence, the seam is not real — you have drawn a boundary in the wrong place.

Step 5 — Write the one-sentence brief

For each persona, write a single sentence describing their mandate. Not their biography. Their mandate. "Hemingway: cut until the sentence cannot be shortened without losing the noun." "Phil Jackson: decide who runs next, not what they produce."

If you get stuck

If you have more than seven crafts, you are probably subdividing one craft into sub-tasks. Sub-tasks belong in the same plugin. Crafts have different registers. Sub-tasks have the same register with different parameters.

If you cannot name a persona for a craft, that is useful information. It means the craft has no exemplar you trust, which means you are not yet sure what "good" looks like. Resolve that before building the plugin.

Deliverable

A text file with three to five entries. Each entry: craft name, persona name, one-sentence mandate, and one-sentence interface description (what it receives, what it returns). Save it as constellation-map.md in your project root.