one-way-door

name	one-way-door
description	Classify a pending decision as reversible or irreversible before it is acted on, and route irreversible ones to the caller instead of auto-deciding. Triggers: "is this a one-way door", "can we undo this", "should I just decide this", "the models disagree with me", before any auto-decided approval gate.
practices	["design-by-contract","fail-safe-defaults"]
skill_api_version	1
hexagonal_role	domain
consumes	[]
produces	["decision-classification.v1"]
context_rel	[{"kind":"supplier-to","with":"premortem"},{"kind":"supplier-to","with":"council"}]
user-invocable	true
metadata	{"tier":"judgment","dependencies":[],"capabilities":["classify_decision_reversibility","escalate_user_challenge"],"effects":["write_advisory_decision_classification"],"canonical_status":"canonical","disposition":"keep_strategy","stability":"experimental"}

/one-way-door

Classify one pending decision as two-way (cheap to undo, may be auto-decided) or one-way (expensive or impossible to undo, always surfaced to the caller). Return the classification and stop. This skill decides who decides. It never decides the underlying question and it never performs the action.

Insight: an agent's confidence is uncorrelated with a decision's reversibility, so confidence is the wrong gate. Reversibility is a property of the decision itself, is knowable before acting, and can be declared in advance instead of inferred from how the question happened to be worded.

The failure mode this exists to prevent: an agent auto-approves an irreversible step because the surrounding batch of decisions was routine and the step read as one more item in the list. Dropped table, force-push over a colleague's work, rotated credential, published post. The batch is why it happens: nineteen two-way decisions train the reflex that answers the twentieth.

dcg guards destructive commands at the shell boundary. This guards destructive decisions at the judgment boundary, before any command exists.

Modes

Trigger phrases	Mode	Entry point
"is this a one-way door", "can we undo this", "classify this decision"	classify	the four layers below
"should I just decide this", "auto-decide the rest"	gate a batch	classify each, act only on two-way
"the models disagree with me", "both reviewers say I'm wrong"	user challenge	the packet below

Inputs

Required: a one-line summary of the pending decision, and the effect it would have if answered wrong.

Optional: a declared decision id from references/decision-registry.md, and the skill or lane raising it.

Non-goals. This skill does not answer the decision, rank options, execute anything, or record the caller's answer. It does not gate shell commands — that is dcg. It does not model caller preferences or build a profile of how the caller usually answers; a preference that suppresses questions is exactly the mechanism that must never reach a one-way door.

Procedure

Apply the four layers in order and stop at the first that fires.

1. Declared registry (primary). Look the decision id up in . If present, use its declared . A declaration in a checked-in file outranks anything inferred from prose, because prose gets reworded and a reworded question must not silently change class.