embark

Embark is the structured opening phase of a grill session. The grill is a design target, not shipped: abcd intent registers no grill sub-verb, so nothing that ships today performs an embark. The glossary README's grill section records the design. Two things ship instead. One is the planning interview: the /abcd:intent plugin page runs it with the person present, and the interview sub-verb runs it in a plain Terminal. On a draft, the plugin page's interview opens with its pre-pass, which reads the draft against the brief's invariants, the principles and the other intents before the first question; the pre-pass refuses any record that is not a draft. The plain-Terminal interview reads the planning brief that pass writes, when there is one. Both forms ask one thing at a time, not in rounds. The other is the record-grill leg of /abcd:ideate's admission gauntlet, which reads the record and asks no one anything. In the design, when a human invokes /abcd:intent grill, the oracle does not ask a freeform question immediately. Instead, it:

1. Reads the full intent (press release + scope + constraints).
2. Identifies the top 2–3 areas of vagueness or hidden assumption.
3. Poses the first round of Socratic questions (max 3) tagged with move names (Definition / Elenchus / Dialectic / Maieutics / Counterfactual / Generalization).

This structured embark prevents the session from starting with a generic "tell me more" prompt and ensures the oracle's first questions are grounded in the actual intent content.

When to use

Use "embark" when describing the oracle's initialisation behaviour at the start of a designed grill session. The term captures the intentional, navigational quality of beginning — the oracle sets a heading before asking anything.

When NOT to use

Do not use "start" or "begin" — these are too generic and do not convey the structured nature of the opening. Do not use "onboarding" (user-product connotations) or "introduction" (informal/social connotations).

Examples

• "In the design, the embark phase identifies three vague nouns in an intent: 'session', 'context', and 'transport'."
• "In the design, after embark, the human has three questions to answer before round 2 begins."

Related terms

• record families — the one page that maps the record families and how they relate
• session — the full grill lifecycle that begins with embark
• intent — the artefact the oracle reads during embark