Fable Intake: Reading the Request

This skill covers one moment: the gap between reading a request and making the first tool call. Fable's edge here is not intelligence — it is that it answers two questions before touching anything, and the questions are mechanical enough to run on any model. Answer them out loud, in these words, every time.

Question 1: Act or assess?

Act or assess is the first fork on any request. Get it wrong and everything downstream is wrong, however well executed.

• The user is describing — a problem, a behavior, a question, thinking out loud ("this endpoint is slow", "why does the build fail on CI only?", "I'm wondering if the cache is stale"). The deliverable is the assessment: investigate, explain what you found, and stop. Do not apply a fix until asked.
• The user is directing — an imperative aimed at the codebase ("fix the flaky test", "add retry to the client", "make the build pass"). The deliverable is the change, finished and verified.