Auto

auto — Intent Router

The front door to OrchestKit. You describe a goal in plain English; the router classifies it and hands off to the right specialist. One entry point, many execution paths.

Why this exists: OrchestKit has 110 skills, but usage telemetry shows users fire only the handful they can name by memory (10 distinct skills across thousands of sessions). The dominant cause of "dead" skills is no front door — not low quality. This router turns "you must know the exact /ork:<name>" into "describe what you want."

Core principle: routing is a deterministic workflow, not an autonomous agent (Anthropic, Building Effective Agents). Classify → confirm → hand off. The router never does the work itself — it picks who does.

When to use

By default, for any goal-shaped request. An unambiguous goal is a 1-step route: auto classifies, confirms in one line, and hands off — no extra hops, so there is no "too obvious for auto".

Design note (2026-07-12): this table previously said "Go direct when you already know the skill / the request maps unambiguously to one". That inverted instruction made the front door structurally unreachable — a competent model always believes it knows the target, so the router recorded near-zero invocations across thousands of sessions (the exact dead-skill problem the "Why this exists" note above describes). Routers must be framed as the default path, not an escape hatch for confusion.

Intent categories → OrchestKit skill

Full per-category parameter extraction + edge cases: references/routing-rules.md.

Model weight (orthogonal second dimension)

Intent picks who does the work. Weight picks how expensive that worker should be. A route is {intent} @ {weight}. Weight never changes the intent and never replaces it. The taxonomy above and the 7 disambiguation rules are untouched by it.

Tiers are the ones already declared in src/agents/*.md frontmatter (haiku 3 · sonnet 23 · opus 6 · inherit 4). No parallel taxonomy.

Resolution is asymmetric: ANY heavy signal ⇒ Heavy; Light requires ALL light signals; everything else is Standard. Under-powering a security review yields a confident wrong answer nobody catches; over-powering a rename only wastes money.

Weight is per leg, not per route. A PR review can be a Heavy security leg plus a Light lint leg. Full signal table, per-intent defaults, and the honest limits of this lever: references/routing-rules.md.

This is the selector, not the cap. src/hooks/src/pretool/task/team-size-gate.ts is an ex-post, per-session counter keyed on ORK_TEAM_OPUS_MAX (default 8). Its default posture is advisory (outputWarning); with ORK_TEAM_SIZE_HARD=1 it escalates to outputDeny and refuses the spawn outright. Either way it reads the model read-only: it can refuse a premium spawn, but it cannot choose a cheaper one for you. Routing is what chooses. The two compose, cap as backstop and routing as selector; never duplicate the cap's counting here.

The flow

  CLASSIFY  ->  CONFIRM  ->  HAND OFF
     |            |             |
  intent       show the     invoke the
  + weight     route        target skill;
  one line     + nod        follow ITS phases

1. Classify

Name the route and the one signal that decided it in a single short line. Example: "'get latency under 200ms' names a metric + a direction, so optimize, not fix."

Apply the disambiguation rules (most specific wins; explicit verb beats inferred intent). The load-bearing one: explicit verb wins — "Fix the slow query" → fix, not optimize. For the full ordered ruleset (all 7, including the truly-ambiguous fallback), references/routing-rules.md is canonical.

Then classify weight in the same pass, naming the signal that decided it: "touches auth and models an attacker → Heavy." Intent first, weight second; a weight call never rewrites the intent you just committed to.

A route: line is a prior, not a verdict. When the prompt context carries one line of the shape route: <class> -> /ork:<skill> (conf 0.xx) or route: <class> -> Agent(<name>) (conf 0.xx), it came from the Jev routing seam (ORK_ROUTE_JEV=steer, off by default, #4233): one typed judgment of the capability class, taken before you read this table. Treat it as the prior for this step, state in one sentence whether you agree and why, and then classify as above. Your reasoning still decides; a confident prior you disagree with is worth a sentence, never a silent override in either direction. The confirm step is unchanged; the hand-off tool follows the target: a /ork: skill goes through the Skill tool, an Agent(...) target through the Agent tool.

2. Confirm (low ceremony)

Show the chosen route in one line and get a nod before handing off:

Goal:   "{original goal}"
Intent: {category}
Weight: {Light|Standard|Heavy} ({tier}), decided by: {signal}
Route:  {skill or loop} {extracted args}
        [run] · [adjust] · [cancel]

For low-risk single-pass routes (verify, review), an inline "routing you to verify — ok?" is enough. Never hand off without a nod.

Premium spend is never silent. Routing down (Light/Standard) needs no approval, because spending less is not a decision the user has to make. Routing up to Heavy is premium spend and gets its own line the user must accept:

⚠️  Heavy route: {N} opus-tier leg(s), triggered by: {heavy signal}
    [approve premium] · [run Standard instead] · [cancel]

If they decline, run Standard and say plainly which check is weakened. Never upgrade mid-handoff or inside a spawned agent the user did not see.

3. Hand off

Invoke the target skill with the extracted parameters and follow that skill's own phases and guardrails — do not override them. The router's job ends at the handoff; the specialist owns execution and its own report.

A hand-off is a Skill-tool invocation, not a recommendation. The failure mode that motivated M170 (#3127): telemetry traced 43 router hand-offs and found ZERO reached an executor skill (implement, cover, fix-issue, review-pr) — the route was named in chat, then the work happened inline in the main loop, so the executors' specialist wiring (implement → backend-system-architect, cover → test-generator) never activated. Therefore:

• Once the user nods, the SAME turn must contain the Skill-tool call for the routed skill. Never end the routing turn with only a description of what will run.
• Doing the routed work inline "because it's faster" is a routing failure, not a shortcut — the executor's parallel specialists and guardrails are the point of routing.
• If the routed skill genuinely cannot run (missing prerequisite, wrong repo state), say exactly that and stop; do not silently absorb the work into the main loop.