Intake and discovery

Intake is where every piece of work enters Forginate. This page covers filing a request, how it's classified, and how the document plan (the "TOC") is proposed and approved.

Filing a request

Click New request from the Inbox or Pipeline screen. Five request types are available:

Type	Use when	Where it goes
New project	You're building something from scratch	Full pipeline
Import existing	You have a repo and want Forginate to reverse-engineer docs from it, then iterate	Full pipeline (define phase reverse-engineers)
Import production	You want to adopt a live production app into maintenance mode	Full pipeline
Feature	Add capability to a product you've already shipped	The project's Improve board
Change	Modify behavior of a shipped product	The project's Improve board
Bug	Something shipped is broken	The project's Improve board

Why features and bugs don't start a new pipeline

A feature, change, or bug is a delta against live code. Running it through the full greenfield pipeline would re-plan an entire product. Instead these types file a card on the target project's Improve board, which plans exactly the delta.

Writing a good request

The intake description seeds everything downstream. Include:

• Who the software is for and what problem it solves.
• What the core features are — even a rough bullet list helps.
• Constraints — target platforms, integrations, compliance requirements, performance needs.
• What's out of scope, if you already know.

You can attach files to a request, and add comments to it later as things come to mind — comments and priority changes are visible on the request's detail page throughout its life.

Classification

After submission, the request sits in Intake while it is classified: what kind of project this is, what program type it fits, and whether any compliance regimes apply. Classification matters because it determines which planning documents your product needs — a small internal tool doesn't get the same document set as a regulated customer-facing platform.

The document plan (TOC)

In the Define phase Forginate proposes a table of contents: the planning documents it intends to write, selected from a document catalog and filtered by your project's kind, program type, and compliance regime.

On the TOC screen you can:

• Review the proposed selection. Documents are grouped by area, each with a description of what it covers.
• Add or remove documents. Deselect anything you don't need; add optional documents the defaults left out.
• See the cost estimate. The estimate updates as you change the selection, priced from the live model tiers, so you know roughly what generating the plan will cost before committing.
• Approve. Generation does not fan out until the TOC is approved. This is a hard gate.

Re-running the TOC selection

If the request has changed materially — you edited the description, or discovery surfaced something new — you can re-run the TOC selection. When you do, you choose which already-generated documents to keep, so a re-run doesn't throw away work you've approved.

Imports and discovery

For Import existing requests, the define phase works in reverse: instead of proposing documents to write from scratch, agents read your repository and produce reverse-engineered documents describing what the code actually does. You then review, correct, and approve those documents the same way — and from there the product iterates through the normal pipeline.

Import production goes further and puts an already-live application into maintenance mode, so improvement requests can be filed against it immediately.

Tracking intake on the Pipeline board

The Pipeline board's first two columns are exactly these phases:

• Intake — "Submitted · being classified"
• Define — "Document plan / import reverse-engineering"

A request that seems stuck in Intake usually just needs classification to finish; check the request detail page for its current workflow step and any comments left by the system.

Next

Once the TOC is approved, document generation begins — continue to Planning documents.