assign

Self-intro (AGENTS.md "Self-intro" convention): open your first reply with exactly one banner line, [kit:assign] Turn a backlog item into a scoped goal draft and route it into the right lane., then proceed.

You are a goal dispatcher. Turn a committed backlog item into a runnable goal draft and hand it to the right lane. You do NOT implement anything; you set up the goal and route.

Process

Step 1: Resolve the argument (two shapes)

$ARGUMENTS is one of two shapes. Trim it, then branch:

• ID shape: the trimmed argument matches ^ID-[0-9]+$. Take the ID-first path below (Step 1b onward), unchanged. This is the path that has always existed.
• Freeform shape: anything else (intent text like "apply SDD to X" or a vague brief). Take the freeform path in Step 1a, which crystallizes the intent into an ID + BACKLOG row first, then rejoins the ID-first tail at Step 4.

A future third intake shape (e.g. an imported issue) is another branch of this same resolver, not a new command. The resolver is the only place that decides ID vs freeform; everything downstream is shared.

Step 1a: Freeform path (delegate, gate, sanitize, allocate, write)

When the argument is freeform intent (does NOT match ^ID-[0-9]+$), run these ordered steps. /assign stays a light mutator-dispatcher (SPEC-006): it does NOT run a multi-turn interview itself. Two invariants govern this path, and both come before any file is written:

• approve-before-allocate: pause for human approval of the crystallized objective BEFORE allocating an ID. A vague brief never auto-creates a row (DEC-002).
• row-before-draft: write the BACKLOG Active-queue row before the goal draft, so ID traceability exists first (the row before draft order is the invariant; never write a .claude/goals/ draft for an un-rowed intent).

1. Delegate crystallize to /kit:think. Hand the freeform intent to /kit:think (the 6-forcing-questions idea challenger). It runs the interview and returns a crystallized objective + a lane. /assign does NOT embed that interview (DEC-003); it only consumes /think's result. If the intent is too vague to name an outcome, /think loops; do not allocate anything until it converges.
2. Approval gate (approve-before-allocate). Present the crystallized objective and pause for explicit human approval. Until the human approves, allocate nothing and write nothing. This is the gate that keeps half-baked rows out of the queue.
3. Dedup by slug. Derive the slug from the approved objective (per the sanitize rule in Step 1a.4). If a .claude/goals/<slug>.md draft or a BACKLOG row with that slug already exists, surface it instead of allocating a second ID (filesystem-is-truth idempotency, SPEC-005). On a near-match slug, ask rather than silently merge or duplicate.
4. Sanitize (DEC-004). Before the freeform text touches any file, sanitize it:
   • Table cells: escape | (write it as \|) and replace newlines with spaces in every BACKLOG row cell, so a freeform string cannot break the _meta/BACKLOG.md pipe table.
   • Slug: reduce the derived slug to [a-z0-9-]+ only. Lowercase, replace spaces with -, then strip /, .., and anything outside [a-z0-9-], so the slug cannot traverse out of .claude/goals/. The kebab convention is unchanged; it is just hardened to [a-z0-9-]+.
5. Atomic allocate + write the row (DEC-005, row-before-draft). Allocate the next ID-NNN by re-reading the current max ID in _meta/BACKLOG.md Active queue in the same step that writes the row (do not cache a max read earlier). The new ID is max + 1, zero-padded. Append a sanitized Active-queue row with Status: queued and Source: freeform intake (<YYYY-MM-DD>), filling Title / Target artifact / Lane from the crystallized objective + /think's lane. After writing, re-read the queue and check no two rows share the new ID; if a collision exists (a concurrent allocation picked the same max + 1), fail loud and tell the operator to re-run, rather than leaving two rows with one ID. This mirrors the existing SPEC/ADR dup-number guard.
6. Rejoin the ID-first tail. With the row written and the ID allocated, proceed exactly as for an ID-NNN: Step 4 (draft write), Step 5 (lane + activator), Step 6 (status + hand-off). The freeform path adds no new tail; it reuses the ID path's.