Two complementary tools for getting expert-fast in a new domain — by treating the domain as a phase space of axes, distributions, and bundles, then making both structure and dynamics visible.
The space carries information, not the items. Find the variables that discriminate.
"Espresso" isn't just "high pressure" — it's pressure + fine grind + short time + expensive machine + ritual. The label is a category.
Picking a value on one axis narrows the others. Surfacing the couplings — with mechanism — turns the chart into a model.
Both demos use coffee brewing methods as the worked example — concrete enough to be readable in one sitting, broad enough to demonstrate the framework's universality.
Six axes of coffee brewing (pressure, time, grind, filtration, cost, ritual) with five named methods plotted on each, endpoint dossiers unpacking each pole as a bundle of co-occurring traits, a radar overlay showing each method's silhouette, and a co-variation panel cataloguing which axes force each other to move together.
Four sliders (water temperature, grind, time, pressure) drive five live outcome bars (bitterness, acidity, body, caffeine, clarity). Presets for espresso, AeroPress, V60, French press, and cold brew snap the inputs to known methods — click between them to feel the bundle structure as a transformation, not just a categorization.
Read the map first; then play with the playground. The map teaches the categories — what the field looks like and why. The playground shows the dynamics — how the categories were produced. The presets in the playground match the named methods in the map, so you can shuttle between "where does X sit?" and "what would it taste like if I changed Y?".
The playground is gated. It only ships when the domain has crisp inputs, crisp outputs, and a publicly known causal model. Coffee passes. Photography, baking, hi-fi audio, plant care all pass. Choosing a database, picking a programming language, evaluating literature — those fail the gate. For those domains the right artifact is the dimensional map alone, because pretending to model dynamics with a weighted sum would actively teach false intuitions.
This honesty is the difference between a teaching tool and pseudo-science. A playground that's wrong is worse than no playground.
These artifacts are produced by two complementary skills designed for Claude Code:
Each skill ships with a SKILL.md spec, four reference docs covering heuristics and anti-patterns, and a self-contained HTML template that you clone and edit (one DATA = { … } block at the top — no build step, no dependencies).