Festival Methodology

Festival Methodology is a goal-oriented project management system for human-AI development workflows. It replaces sprints, story points, and time estimates with steps to goals.

Core Concepts

• Festivals: Top-level project containers with a specific goal
• Phases: Major stages (planning, implementation, review), prefixed NNN_ (e.g., 001_PLAN/)
• Sequences: Ordered groups of related tasks within a phase, prefixed NN_ (e.g., 01_setup/)
• Tasks: Atomic work units as markdown files, prefixed NN_ (e.g., 01_create_schema.md)

Hierarchy

Festival
└── Phase       (NNN_UPPER_CASE/)
    └── Sequence    (NN_lower_snake_case/)
        └── Task        (NN_lower_snake_case.md)

Lifecycle

planning/ → ready/ → active/ → dungeon/completed/

Key CLI Commands

fest understand methodology    # Learn the methodology
fest create festival           # Create a new festival
fest next                      # Get next actionable task
fest task completed            # Mark task done
fest commit -m "msg"           # Commit with festival traceability
fest validate                  # Check structure
fest status                    # View progress

When You Detect Festival Context

If you're working in a directory containing festivals/, or the user references festival methodology concepts, use fest commands rather than manual file manipulation. The CLI handles naming, validation, and traceability automatically.

Always run fest next to determine what to work on rather than manually picking tasks (it respects dependency order).