Start or remember work without choosing a skill

Use one request to get a durable artifact and a visible workspace entry. You do not need to decide whether the work belongs in an intent, brief, spec, or defect record first.

Start work on adding export retention controls for workspace owners.

The agent uses work-intake to classify the request from its content, writes the canonical artifact, registers it in workspace.toml, and reports the route. It dispatches a processor only after both writes succeed.

Start work now

Describe the outcome, constraints, and evidence you already have. The common routes are:

• One independently shippable change becomes a spec and continues through new-spec for your approval.
• A coherent outcome that needs several specs becomes a Draft brief.
• A cited regression becomes defect context for bug-fix.
• A bounded outcome that should be preserved before a solution artifact is chosen goes to intake-intent and becomes a Draft repository intent.

If two routes are plausible, the agent asks for the smallest missing choice or records the gap. It does not infer that incomplete work is ready.

Start from confirmed upstream shaping

When an installed shaping workflow offers a validated handoff, ask:

Start this confirmed delivery handoff through Core intake.

One independently shippable feature enters as a delivery contract for new-spec. Multi-spec or cross-repository work enters as a delivery brief for author-delivery-brief continue or create. The handoff supplies bounded context and provenance; it does not approve an artifact or skip a gate.

If the destination is ambiguous, intake stops for your choice without writing. If no handoff is present, Core follows the ordinary routes above. External locators remain opaque unless another trusted workflow has already acquired and supplied matching bounded content.

Remember work for later

Say that you want to remember the work and stop:

Remember that workspace owners need export retention controls. Do not start implementation.

The agent creates a Draft artifact, registers non-dispatchable membership, and stops. A future workspace-status call can surface it, but work-loop cannot execute it until the required artifact and approvals exist.

For intent-only capture, intake-intent records the outcome, boundary, owner, unresolved questions, projection, and source. Product altitude, opportunity, assumptions, scale, and JTBD context are optional. Before it can become Accepted, the owner sends the intent and one attributed evidence packet to an independent cold shaping review. Findings return to the owner for revision; a revision-bound Clean still needs explicit human confirmation. If no isolated subagent, fresh context, or independent human is available, the owner emits BLOCKED and leaves the intent Draft. If an intent already exists, the skill updates that repository path instead of creating a renamed copy. Chat-only or personal/vault input also needs a confirmed repository destination and explicit authority transfer; its minimized source locator remains provenance, never executable work.

Check status or request refresh

For a read-only view, say:

workspace-status

work-intake passes this directly to workspace-status; it does not reclassify or edit the result. For an existing registered tracker-origin artifact, request work-intake refresh and review the field-level delta. Refresh changes local requirements only after the lifecycle permits it and an authorized approver records every decision. Any supported remote coordination write is separate and requires its own fresh, exact confirmation. See Use work intake for the full flow and tracker capability limits.

Read and write boundary

The route reads your normalized request, existing target paths, and workspace.toml. It may create one canonical artifact and register one schema-valid entry. Source text is treated as untrusted data, and target paths must remain inside the repository and configured artifact directory.

The agent asks before overwriting an artifact, changing its location or authority, or accepting input whose confidentiality does not fit the target.

What you have now

You have a canonical work artifact and a visible lifecycle entry, or a read-only status view of existing work. Use the reported route to continue through approval and work-loop, or leave remembered work safely deferred.

Next step

Run workspace-status to confirm lifecycle state. When it shows an approved spec with a sibling plan as ready, say work-loop to implement it.

See Work-intake routing and lifecycle for the complete route table and Why work begins with an artifact for the model behind it.