Tame Big Requests with Festival Intake

Where this fits

You paste a 40-line ticket into chat: "Migrate auth from library X to library Y, update tests, docs, and CI." An agent that immediately starts editing will produce partial work and drift. This skill fits at the moment before work begins. festival-intake sizes the request and routes it into a festival workflow plan so the agent can execute multi-step work without step-by-step supervision.

Why agents benefit

• Recognizes when a request is too large for one chat answer and says so before creating anything.
• Picks a route from three gears: answer inline, create workflow, or escalate to multi-phase plan.
• Produces a structured, resumable plan that can survive session boundaries.
• Uses trigger phrases like "plan this" and "where do I start" to activate early.
• Enforces a consistent intake sequence (size, route, scaffold) instead of guessing.

Practical scenarios

Migrating a legacy service

A user hands over a migration ticket with dependencies and risks. Instead of editing files randomly, festival-intake creates a named workflow with ordered steps; the agent can work through it methodically and report progress.

Refactoring across many files

"Refactor the data layer to use repositories" spans dozens of files. The skill sizes it as multi-phase, writes a plan, and breaks the refactor into reviewable chunks before changes happen.

Multi-thread research question

"Compare our deployment options" has security, cost, and operational threads. Festival-intake routes it into a structured research plan, preventing the agent from collapsing all threads into one shallow answer.

Add it to your agent workflow

Install the skill in your agent environment:

npx skills add Obedience-Corp/festival --skill festival-intake

Then let the skill fire naturally. For example, a user says:

This ticket is a big one: upgrade Postgres, add read replicas, and update the backup runbook. Where do I start?

The agent runs festival-intake, says which gear this is, and creates fest create workflow postgres-upgrade rather than jumping straight to code. For a full description of the intake steps, see the skill page at https://www.openagentskill.com/skills/obedience-corp-festival-intake.

Compare before adopting

Before adding festival-intake, compare a few things. Quality signals: does the skill actively route or just summarize? Maintenance freshness: check recent commits and issue responses. Alternatives: your agent may already have a planning primitive; festival-intake is useful when you want a repeatable intake gate. Workflow fit: does it match how you hand over specs and tickets? This skill is specific to the festival ecosystem, so make sure that is the planning model you want.

Why it is worth tracking

Festival-intake has 47 stars, but more importantly it solves a real coordination problem: knowing which requests need a plan and which should be answered inline. It is worth tracking because it is the front door of a growing skill family, and adopting it early establishes a consistent pattern for agent-driven work intake. Evaluate it the next time a large, unstructured request causes your agent to spin.