festival: Instructions file for Codex

Festival

Festival is a goal-oriented project management methodology for human and AI development workflows, driven by the fest and camp CLIs, installed and kept in sync by a third tool, festival. It organizes work as festivals made of phases, sequences, and tasks, with quality gates between them.

What ships

• The fest and camp CLIs, which the session-start hook installs and keeps current.

• festival, the suite installer and updater. The session-start hook does not manage it; install it yourself from the installation guide.

• 12 skills describing the workflows:

• camp-navigation: Navigate a camp with cgo and camp go. Use when you need to move between projects/festivals/workflow directories, switch context quickly, or resolve script-safe paths with camp go --print.

• camp-projects: Manage a camp's projects. Use when committing inside projects/*, deciding status/pull/push scope (root vs submodule vs all), or creating/removing project worktrees.

• camp-workitems: Find, filter, choose, create, or adopt camp work items with camp workitem, camp wi, or camp workitems. Use when a user wants current active work across intents, designs, explore notes, festivals, or tracked workflow directories; when agents need safe camp workitem --json output; or when creating/adopting tracked workflow folders.

• campaign-commit: Choose the correct commit command in a camp, also called a campaign. Use when you are about to commit and need to select camp commit, camp p commit, fest commit, or intentional root pointer sync via camp refs-sync.

• campaign-structure: Orient within a camp's directory structure. Use when deciding where work belongs (intents vs festivals vs design vs docs vs dungeon), especially when a task is not yet planned or folder ownership is unclear.

• campaign-workflows: Manage a camp's intents, dungeons, and workflow collections with camp. Use when capturing ideas, promoting intents to festivals, archiving work, or moving workflow items between statuses.

• cross-campaign: Discover and reference other camps, projects, and files across camp boundaries. Use when the user mentions another camp or campaign by name, references work done "in another project/camp", or needs to find/copy/compare code across camps.

• fest-execution: Execute active festival tasks. Use when finding the next task, marking tasks completed/blocked/reset, committing with festival traceability, advancing workflow steps, and validating sequence progress.

• fest-methodology: Use when the user mentions festivals, the fest CLI, phases, sequences, or tasks, or when working inside a festivals/ directory. Provides the core Festival methodology model so Claude understands the planning system.

• fest-planning: Plan and scaffold festivals. Use when creating festival/phase/sequence/task structure, enforcing naming rules, linking festivals to projects, and promoting lifecycle states.

• fest-standalone-workflows: Create and run lightweight standalone WORKFLOW.md loops with fest create workflow, fest next, and fest workflow advance. Use when a user wants step-by-step workflow guidance inside any ordinary directory, explore/design work item, project folder, or thin-start workflow.

• festival-intake: Route work that is too large for a single chat into a structured plan. Use when the user describes a multi-step build, a migration, a rewrite, an audit, a refactor across many files, or a research question with several threads. Use when a goal would otherwise need step-by-step supervision across more than one session. Also use when the user says "plan this", "where do I start", "help me build X", "this is a big one", or hands over a spec, a ticket, or a document and asks what to do with it.