Teardown Atlas holds maps of whole subjects, drawn as interactive 3D exploded views. Each map shows a subject the way its professionals see it, so a newcomer can find the questions they did not know to ask.
Search helps once you know what to ask
A newcomer starts with a goal, such as "I want to make a game", and few of the words the subject uses. A search engine answers the question you type, so it helps most once you know which question to ask. A teardown lays out the whole subject first, in its professionals' terms. You spot the parts you had no name for, and then you can look them up.
A teardown starts from the finished thing
The first view is a typical example as people meet it: a game being played on a screen, or a novel. Click it to take it apart into the 5 to 10 parts a practitioner names first. Each part gives the professional term, plain words for a newcomer, what the part does for the whole, and the question a practitioner asks about it. Click a part to go one level down. A branch ends where a practitioner acts directly: a setting to choose, a measure to read or a named rule.
Catalogues hold what changes between examples
Genre, style and device differ from one example to the next. A teardown puts them in catalogues you can switch between, and the parts underneath stay the same: a growth engine is a growth engine in any genre. Feedback loops get their own entries, such as an engine and the brake that limits it. The flatpack lists the order in which practitioners put the parts together into the finished thing.
Every part cites the subject's own reading list
Each teardown starts with a survey of at least 8 independent reading lists from its subject: practitioners' recommendations, course syllabi and the bibliographies of standard texts. A work that 3 or more lists name counts as canon and is cited first. Each citation quotes the words on the page that support the part, and a script opens every cited page to check that the quote is there. Open Sources on a teardown to see every work it cites, with a link to find each book.
You can hold any part against your own project
Every part has a Copy button under "Use it on your project". It copies a request for an AI agent that has the teardown skills installed. The agent holds that part against your project and reports what is there, what is missing and what to change. Press / on a teardown to search its index.
The prompt is public, so you can make your own
Every teardown here comes from the teardown skill, a prompt for AI agents. Copy it from the home page into your agent and name a subject. The skill folder also holds the schema and the build scripts the prompt runs.
You can offer your teardown to this site
The site takes no uploads. Instead, the teardown-upload skill opens a pull request with your teardown on iqrow/teardowns, a public repository. A teardown that gets merged can appear here with credit to its author. The legal page says what you agree to when you offer one.