New Work Intake

New Work Intake

New work turns a request in plain language, in any language, into well-specified cards. A planner session reads the repository, interviews you until the task is clear, and proposes one card, several independent cards, or a staged stack. Nothing lands on the Board until you accept it.

How it works

sequenceDiagram
  actor P as You
  participant W as Nautelle
  participant R as Runner (read-only planner)
  P->>W: New work: "What to do" + attachments + model
  W->>R: planner turn
  R-->>W: question round (1 of at most 4)
  W-->>P: questions with recommendations
  P->>W: Send answers / Enough — generate
  W->>R: next turn
  R-->>W: one card, a split or a stack
  W-->>P: candidates in Drafts
  P->>W: Accept / Reject / Accept all
  W-->>P: cards in To Do

Loading

1. Click Board › New work. The dialog has one field, What to do, with no title and no fixed language. It can be one task or several. Add attachments if they help, and pick a Model for this request.
2. Start runs a planner turn on the project's runner. It runs in plan mode: it reads the repository, never writes to it, and the control plane reads nothing of the project.
3. The planner asks a round of questions, in your language, at most four rounds in all. Each question has options, a recommendation with its reason and Write your own. Step through them with Previous / Next, then Send answers.
4. Enough — generate ends the interview at any point. Unanswered questions take their recommendations.
5. The planner writes the result in English: a title and a body that is a mini-spec.

Tip

Your default planning model is set under Account › Planning model. The Model in the dialog overrides it for one request only.

What the intake proposes

Proposal	When	What you can change
One card	one clear task	title, kind, body
Split, 2–8 cards	several independent tasks, or one task too big for one agent	titles, Feature/Bug, remove entries; Keep one card declines the split
Stack	one larger piece of work whose parts must happen in order and share one look, or several UI changes to one surface	switch between Split and Stack, move cards between stages, turn the shared design on or off

Split cards are independent: they have no dependency links. In a stack, every card of a stage depends on every card of the stage before it. → Design and Stacks

Candidates in Drafts

The intake writes candidates, not cards. They appear in the Drafts strip above the Board's columns, grouped by intake.

• Open a candidate to edit its title, kind and body by hand.
• Reject marks it rejected and makes nothing.
• Accept makes the card in To Do.
• Accept all on a split or a stack accepts it as independent cards, or as the stack as proposed.
• The selection bar can regroup candidates across intakes into one new stack.

Each candidate is decided once. Accepting several at once commits in one step, or not at all. The intake's attachments go to the first card accepted from it. When no candidate is pending, the intake leaves Drafts.

Closing the dialog keeps the intake. Drafts also lists intakes still in progress, with Resume and Discard.

Note

The Inbox column is separate: it holds suggestions from Capture, not intake candidates. See Board and Cards.

From Telegram

A linked operator can run the same intake from the Telegram bot.

1. Send /new <text>, or /new followed by the description in the next message.
2. Each question arrives as its own message, with one button per option, or toggle buttons plus Done for a multiple-choice question. A text reply to a question is your own answer.
3. Send answers and Enough — generate work as on the web.

Photos sent with /new, as its caption or during the interview are attached to the request. They are stored as ordinary uploads under the same type and size limits.

Voice messages are transcribed by a Whisper-compatible speech-to-text service that an admin configures (SPEECH_TO_TEXT_URL, optional SPEECH_TO_TEXT_API_KEY, SPEECH_TO_TEXT_MODEL, default whisper-1). The bot echoes "Heard: …" before using the text. The audio is never stored. Without a configured service, the bot says voice input is off.

Discuss mode

Board › Discuss asks a question about the repository, or asks for an analysis, without making any work.

• A read-only planner session answers the opening question, then one message per turn, with no round limit.
• You can choose installed skills for the whole discussion when you start it.
• Each answer may end with up to 8 proposals. Make a card under a proposal opens New work with the proposal prefilled, and the intake writes the card as usual.
• A discussion never makes a card by itself. It stays in Drafts with Resume and Discard until you discard it.

Earlier plans

Before New work, the Planner turned a brief into a task graph. No new plans start any more, but existing plans stay readable on the Board's plan panel and the read-only Planner pages. Their tasks keep showing on the Board until the plan is closed.

Limits

• At most 4 question rounds per intake.
• A split or a stack holds 2–8 cards.
• Card titles are English and at most 80 characters.
• The intake needs an online runner that can run planner turns. Without one, Start is off and says why.

See also

• How Work Flows · Board and Cards · Design and Stacks · Telegram

Decisions: ADR-0034 · ADR-0037 · ADR-0044 · ADR-0056 · ADR-0057 · ADR-0058 · Spec: #337, #409, #524, #574, #590, #592, #594