Intake external source material into a product brief

Use this when: Intake has identified a coherent multi-feature outcome that needs a Draft brief. Prerequisites: The core pack installed and normalized source content to hand; no existing brief file at the target slug path. Result: A Draft brief at docs/product/briefs/<slug>.md with a matching non-dispatchable workspace.toml entry.

Start with work-intake when you have an email, issue, or conversation rather than a confirmed artifact route. It normalizes the bounded facts and invokes author-delivery-brief create only when the content forms one coherent multi-feature outcome.

For a confirmed upstream delivery brief, use:

Intake this confirmed delivery brief and preserve its handoff provenance.

Core admits the bounded fields through work-intake. An existing brief continues through author-delivery-brief continue; otherwise create mode authors the Draft. An external locator is recorded as opaque provenance. Core does not fetch, search, probe, or read it.

Is author-delivery-brief create the right entry point?

Situation	Skill to invoke
You have source material but have not chosen an artifact route	work-intake
Intake has classified a coherent multi-feature outcome	author-delivery-brief create
You already have a repository brief and need to review or slice it	author-delivery-brief continue
You are authoring a single feature spec directly, without a brief	new-spec

The tell for create mode is bounded input that is not yet a repository brief. If the brief already exists in the repository, use continue mode.

Before you start

You need:

• The core pack installed in your target repo.
• Any unstructured input — a pasted email, issue body, message, or verbal description. It does not need to be complete or well-formatted.
• No existing brief file at docs/product/briefs/<slug>.md (the skill checks for a slug collision before writing).

Steps

1. Invoke work-intake with raw or ambiguous input. It treats the source as untrusted data, retains minimized provenance, and passes bounded normalized content to author-delivery-brief create when a brief is the clear route. If you already know the artifact route, invoke create mode directly.

2. The skill names what it found and what is missing. It scans the input for the outcome, constraints or appetite, assumptions or risks, and safe source provenance, then reports what is present and what a later Ready review must resolve.

3. Answer the elicitation for missing fields.

   • An identifiable multi-slice outcome lets the Draft proceed. If it is missing, the skill records that blocking gap rather than inventing one.
   • Constraints, appetite, assumptions, and risks improve readiness but do not block Draft creation.
   • Safe source provenance is required; raw source payloads are not copied.

4. Confirm the slug. The skill proposes a kebab-case slug that becomes the filename (docs/product/briefs/<slug>.md). Confirm or correct it. If a file already exists at that path, the skill stops and prompts you before writing.

5. Brief file created and registered in workspace.toml. The skill writes docs/product/briefs/<slug>.md with Status: Draft, then registers the structured Draft entry. If registration fails, it rolls back the file when safe or leaves an explicit non-dispatchable reconciliation finding. It never silently degrades to file-only success.

6. Brief is queued as draft. The skill confirms the brief is at docs/product/briefs/<slug>.md and tells you to run author-delivery-brief continue next for readiness and optional slice selection.

What create mode does and does not do

author-delivery-brief create stops at Draft — it creates the file and names Ready gaps but does not decompose the brief into specs. Use continue mode for that.

Next step

When the brief has enough outcome, scope, constraints, assumptions, risks, and provenance to pass your human Ready gate, run author-delivery-brief continue. Ready may contain zero specs; create a spec only after a separate slice confirmation. See Continue a delivery brief and confirm delivery slices.