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Skill: Flight Lines
Have a little Deleuze and Guattari, as a treat.
The following Claude Skill is where my early work on led me. The key insight in the metastructuralist project is what I refer to as the “LLM Isomorphism Principle” - the idea that because the latent space of an LLM is capable of representing a large number of very different domains in a single ~continuous space, we can treat it as a translation layer that enables us to take any representable domain as isomorphic to any other.
What this means in practice is that we can apply the operations from domain A to the objects of domain B, for instance, as long as their structural makeup is compatible. It took me a long time to get this into a concise format, and then imagine my surprise when I realized that was I was describing was in fact a pretty precise recapitulation of some of the more complex ideas from Deleuze and Guattari.
I ultimately landed on the following generalization, which is experimental but can be quite interesting to apply to a wide range of problems. Taken on its own, this skill is for brainstorming novels solutions to complex problems. But you can also use it as a sort of base, or meta-skill, that can be used to make legible other skills which define arbitrary assemblages by combining concepts across otherwise unrelated domains in more targeted ways.
You can install this skill into your claude code by using the following two commands:
# Add the marketplace (once)
/plugin marketplace add mbilokonsky/claude_skills
# Install individual skill
/plugin install flight-lines@mbilokonsky/claude_skills
If you play with this, please what you think - I’d love to find folks to explore these ideas with!
---
name: flight-lines
description: "Navigate problems along lines of flight by composing operations from arbitrary domains. Operations are deterritorialized capacities—they don't belong to their origin domains. Mycorrhizal signaling + ham radio protocols + rare book dealer networks can compose into a single assemblage. The composer maintains parallel work-paths, constantly revising as new structure emerges."
---
# Flight Lines
## Theoretical Ground
Knowledge gets organized into **domains**—epidemiology, jazz theory, mycology, contract law. These are stratifications: useful for organizing expertise but not fundamental boundaries. They're territories.
**Operations** exist beneath these strata. "Sentinel surveillance" isn't essentially about disease—it's a capacity: strategic monitoring of high-signal locations in sparse search spaces. "Reharmonization" isn't essentially about jazz—it's changing underlying structure while preserving surface continuity. Operations are **deterritorialized capacities** that got captured by domain-strata through historical accident.
The conventional approach to problems stays within domain boundaries. Dating advice for dating problems. Language pedagogy for language problems. This is navigating along the strata—safe, predictable, limited.
**Lines of flight** are movements that escape stratified territories. When you recognize that rare book dealer "want list circulation" addresses the same structural constraint as epidemiological "contact tracing"—and both could apply to finding collaborators in a new city—you're accessing operations on a **plane of consistency** where domain labels don't constrain what composes with what.
**Key insight**: Operations compose based on structural fit, not semantic coherence. An assemblage of mycorrhizal networks + ham radio + rare book collecting is domain-incoherent but can be structurally coherent for a given problem.
## What This Enables
**Stratified approach:**
- Problem: "I just moved to a new city and want to build a life here"
- Solution space: Networking advice, meetup apps, "put yourself out there"
- Limitation: Stays within conventional self-help territory
**Compositional approach:**
- Identify parallel concerns: shelter/territory, social/connection, work/sustenance, identity/becoming
- For each concern, identify structural constraints (not semantic categories)
- Query for operations addressing those constraints from ANY domain
- Compose operations that work together, revising as structure changes
- Result: Novel assemblage that couldn't emerge from any single domain
## Core Concepts
### Operation
A specific capacity with defined mechanics—not a concept or metaphor:
- **What it acts on**: Input structure
- **What it produces**: Output structure
- **What it preserves**: Invariants under the transformation
- **What it transforms**: What necessarily changes
- **How you execute it**: Concrete procedure
Examples:
- **Sentinel surveillance** (epidemiology): Monitor high-signal nodes to detect sparse events early
- **Mycelial resource sharing** (mycology): Distribute resources through network based on need signals
- **Want list circulation** (rare books): Broadcast specific search criteria through dealer networks
- **CQ calls** (ham radio): General broadcast seeking any responder, establishes who's listening
- **Nurse logs** (forest ecology): Use decaying structure as substrate for new growth
- **Load balancing** (distributed systems): Distribute work across nodes to prevent bottlenecks
### Structural Constraint
A property of the problem that creates difficulty—independent of domain framing:
- Sparse signal in noise (most encounters are mismatches)
- Cold start (no existing network to leverage)
- Resource scarcity (limited time, energy, money)
- Information asymmetry (can't identify compatible parties externally)
- Temporal dynamics (windows of opportunity, decay rates)
- Network topology (fragmented patches, no clear hubs)
- Identity flux (who you're becoming isn't who you were)
### Assemblage
A composition of heterogeneous operations that work together. Assemblages don't require domain coherence—they require **structural coherence**:
- Each operation addresses different constraints
- Operations don't contradict each other
- Together they form executable protocol
- Domain mixing is expected, not anomalous
### Line of Flight
A trajectory that escapes stratified solutions. When standard approaches feel exhausted and you start pulling operations from mycology and espionage and thermodynamics to address your problem—you're following a line of flight.
Not all lines of flight succeed. Some dissipate, some get recaptured by strata, some open genuine new territory.
## The Compositional Method
This is not a linear pipeline. It's an ongoing process with parallel paths and constant revision.
### 1. Map the Terrain
Don't ask "what kind of problem is this?" (that's seeking a stratum to navigate within).
Ask: "What are the parallel concerns here? What structural properties make each one hard?"
**Example: Fresh Start in a New City**
An adult has moved to a new city. They want to build a life—not just survive, but flourish. Not replicate their old life, but become someone new while honoring who they've been.
Parallel concerns identified:
- **Territory**: Physical space, shelter, navigable environment
- **Sustenance**: Income, work, economic participation
- **Connection**: Social bonds, community, belonging
- **Orientation**: Understanding how this place works, its rhythms and norms
- **Becoming**: Identity work—who are you here, without old context?
For each concern, structural constraints:
**Territory constraints:**
- Resource scarcity (housing costs, competition)
- Information asymmetry (locals know what you don't)
- Temporal pressure (need shelter immediately)
- Quality uncertainty (can't assess neighborhood without living there)
**Connection constraints:**
- Cold start (no existing network)
- Sparse matching (most people aren't compatible for deep connection)
- Context collapse (no shared history to build on)
- Activation energy (initiating contact is costly)
- Decay dynamics (new connections fade without maintenance)
**Becoming constraints:**
- Identity flux (old identity doesn't fit, new one not yet formed)
- Legibility gap (others can't read you without context)
- Self-coherence pressure (need continuity while changing)
- Scaffolding absence (no existing structures support new becoming)
### 2. Query for Operations (Broadly)
For each structural constraint, ask: "What operations address this structural property?"
**Don't constrain by domain.** Query across everything you understand.
**Cold start constraint** (no existing network):
Operations that address cold start:
- **Spore dispersal** (mycology): Broadcast widely, most fail, some find substrate
- **CQ calls** (ham radio): General broadcast announcing presence, seeing who responds
- **Seed banks** (ecology): Dormant connections that activate when conditions right
- **Pioneer species** (succession ecology): First colonizers that make environment habitable for others
- **Loss leaders** (retail): Offer value at cost to establish presence, profit comes later
**Sparse matching constraint** (most people aren't compatible):
Operations:
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