Issue Intake Studio

The Issue Intake Studio is a guided three-step wizard for creating new pipeline issues. It composes conventions-aware drafting, historical cost estimation, and a filing or decomposition decision into a single flow. Access it from the File issue button on the Current Status tab, or navigate directly to /repos/<owner>/<name>/new.

Draft step

The first step collects the issue content:

• Title — a short description of the work.
• Body — a Markdown description of what needs to be done. The body field surfaces immediate scope hints below the field — a warning when the body is fewer than 50 characters, and a too-broad signal when the body contains more than five H2 sections.
• Labels — optional comma-separated GitHub labels to apply (e.g. bug, enhancement).
• Complexity — optional hint (Small, Medium, or Large) used to refine the cost estimate. Leave blank to let Colony auto-detect.

Scope hints and the too-broad signal

When the body contains more than five H2 sections, the scope validation flags the draft as too broad. A hint appears below the body field explaining that the draft may benefit from decomposition. This signal also affects the Decision step (see below).

Validate against conventions

When your repository has a .colony/conventions.md file, a Validate against conventions button appears below the scope hints. Clicking it runs an LLM-backed check of the draft title and body against your conventions file and lists any misalignments as warnings. When the draft is fully aligned, a short confirmation message is shown instead. If no .colony/conventions.md is configured for the repo, the button is hidden.

The check is triggered on demand rather than automatically to avoid per-keystroke LLM cost. If you edit the title or body after running the check, the result is cleared and the button reappears so you can re-run the check against your updated draft.

Estimate step

The second step shows a historical cost estimate for the drafted issue. Click Get estimate to fetch the estimate. The panel displays three cost percentiles:

Percentile	Meaning
p10	A lean, optimistic outcome — 10% of similar issues completed at or below this cost.
p50	The median outcome — half of similar issues completed at or below this cost.
p90	A conservative, high-cost outcome — 90% of similar issues completed at or below this cost.

Estimates are drawn from historical completed issues with similar descriptions and complexity. When the local sample is small, the estimate blends in cross-organisation data; the panel notes the blend ratio when global data accounts for 50% or more of the sample. Estimates reflect past performance and do not guarantee future outcomes.

You can click Next without fetching an estimate to proceed directly to the Decision step.

Decision step

The third step branches based on the scope signal from the Draft step:

When the draft is within scope — a secondary Decompose instead option is available alongside the primary File as a single issue button. Most drafts take this path.

When the draft is too broad — the Decompose into an epic plan button is shown prominently, and the description explains that the draft looks broad. You can still file it as a single issue with the File as a single issue button.

File as a single issue

Clicking File as a single issue posts the draft to the pipeline immediately. Colony creates a GitHub issue with the specified title, body, labels, and complexity hint and adds it to the pipeline queue. A success view shows the new issue number and a link to GitHub.

Decompose into an epic plan

Clicking either Decompose into an epic plan or Decompose instead opens the Import Plan dialog pre-seeded with a scaffolded plan derived from the draft. Each H2 section in the body becomes a task in the plan, preserving the section heading and content. If the body has no H2 sections, the plan contains a single task using the issue title.

The scaffolded plan is editable before preview or import. Review and adjust the task list, then use the standard import flow to create the epic.