# Finding Your Bearing


Guide is an AI agent that understands your organization's agent-aligned
engineering standard — skills, levels, behaviours, disciplines, tracks, and
career progression — and reasons about them in context. Instead of reading
through YAML files and documentation, you ask Guide questions in plain language
and get answers grounded in your team's actual definitions.

## What Guide Does

### Onboarding

New to the team? Guide helps you orient quickly. It explains your role's
expectations, what skills matter most at your level, and how your discipline is
structured. Instead of piecing together information from multiple documents, you
get a coherent picture of what is expected from day one.

### Career Advice

Guide identifies growth areas based on gap analysis between your current level
and your target. It reads the skill and behaviour expectations for both levels
and explains what changes, what stays the same, and where the biggest jumps are.
The advice is specific to your discipline and track, not generic career
guidance.

### Skill Assessment

When you want to understand how your work maps to your agent-aligned engineering
standard, Guide can interpret engineering artifacts — pull requests, design
documents, code reviews — against the markers defined for each skill. It
explains which markers your work demonstrates and at what proficiency level.

### Contextual Help

Working on a task and wondering what your agent-aligned engineering standard
says about it? Guide references the right skills and behaviours for your level
and discipline. If you are doing a code review, it can tell you what your
agent-aligned engineering standard expects at your level for that activity. If
you are writing a design document, it surfaces the relevant system design
markers.

### Problem-Solving

Engineering decisions benefit from team standards. Guide knows your
agent-aligned engineering standard's expectations around quality, testing,
architecture, and collaboration, and can inform your decisions with that
context.

## Example Questions

Guide responds to natural language questions about your agent-aligned
engineering standard:

- **"What should I focus on to reach the next level?"** — Guide compares your
  current level's expectations with the next level and highlights the skills and
  behaviours that change.
- **"How does our team approach code review?"** — Guide finds the relevant
  skills and markers for code review in your agent-aligned engineering standard
  and explains the expectations at your level.
- **"I'm new — where do I start?"** — Guide walks you through your discipline's
  structure, your role's core skills, and the behaviours the team values.
- **"What does 'working' proficiency in system design look like?"** — Guide
  reads the markers for that skill at that level and explains them with context.
- **"I wrote this design doc — what skill markers does it demonstrate?"** —
  Guide interprets the artifact against your agent-aligned engineering
  standard's skill markers and explains what it sees.

## How Guide Uses Skill Markers

Guide reads the markers defined in your capability YAML files — the same markers
visible in Pathway's job definitions. When it interprets an artifact or answers
a question, it references specific markers at specific proficiency levels, so
you can see exactly where its answer comes from.

For example, if your agent-aligned engineering standard defines these markers
for system design at "working" proficiency:

- _Designs services with clear API boundaries_
- _Documents trade-offs in design decisions_

Guide will reference those specific markers when assessing your design document,
rather than applying generic criteria.

This grounding in your agent-aligned engineering standard means Guide's answers
are consistent with what your team has defined as good engineering. Two people
asking the same question get the same foundational answer, because the source of
truth is shared.

## Getting Started

Guide works with your Map data out of the box. If you have authored an
agent-aligned engineering standard (skills, levels, behaviours defined in YAML)
and validated it with Map, Guide can reason about it immediately. There is no
separate setup or configuration — Guide reads from the same data that Pathway
and Summit use.

## Related Documentation

- [Data Model Reference](/docs/reference/model/) — How skills, levels, and
  behaviours are structured
- [Authoring Agent-Aligned Engineering Standards](/docs/products/authoring-standards/)
  — How to define the agent-aligned engineering standard that Guide reasons
  about