0006: `orion new` and the plan stage are sequential phases, not two front doors

• Status: Accepted
• Date: 2026-08-28

Context

orion new "<idea>" starts an interactive conversation (discovery) before anything is derived, because the intent, spec and plan stages run through claude -p and cannot ask the user anything once started — one ambiguous premise there propagates into spec, plan, scaffold and the tracker tree, costing far more to unwind than the conversation would have cost to have. There was a question of whether interactive discovery and the async plan stage should instead be two independent entry points a user picks between.

Decision

orion new and the plan stage are sequential phases of one flow, not two front doors, with the Jira project (created at orion provision) as the handoff artifact between them.

Consequences

• Interactive interrogation belongs in new, because a human is present at that point to answer it.
• The plan stage (and the stages after it — scaffold, decompose) keeps the async discovery gate instead: unresolved Open questions in the intent file block those stages until answered in the file itself, because by the time plan runs no human is assumed present to prompt.
• A user cannot skip straight to plan expecting an interactive prompt; ambiguity there surfaces as a blocking open question in the artifact, not a conversation.