adaptive-quality-gate

name

adaptive-quality-gate

description

Use when work produces a deliverable, factual claim, dataset, code change, decision, publication, deployment, automation, or irreversible action whose failure would matter; when the user asks for a quality gate, acceptance criteria, QA, completeness, validation, audit, evidence, preflight, release readiness, or a definition of done; or before claiming completion on medium- or high-risk work. Automatically decide whether a formal gate is warranted, derive task-specific pass/fail criteria, gather evidence, and block unsupported completion. Make sure to use this skill even when the user does not say "quality gate" if consequential work needs acceptance criteria or completion evidence. Skip formal gating for trivial, reversible, low-impact requests.

Adaptive Quality Gate

Set quality gates from the task's outcome and risk. Do not reuse a domain checklist merely because it worked for a previous scraping, SEO, coding, or content task.

Core Contract

A gate is a decision rule backed by evidence. It is not a reminder to "check quality."

For every material criterion, define:

• Criterion: the property that must be true.
• Threshold: the observable boundary between pass and fail.
• Method: how the property will be tested.
• Evidence: the artifact or result that proves the test ran.
• Severity: hard gate or advisory gate.
• Failure action: hold, repair and retest, request a decision, or accept a documented exception.

Apply gates before irreversible actions and before making a completion, readiness, safety, or quality claim. Never convert missing evidence into a pass.

1. Decide The Gate Level

Assess four factors:

• Impact: what happens if the result is wrong or incomplete?
• Reversibility: how easily can the action or artifact be corrected?
• Uncertainty: how much is unknown about inputs, requirements, or tools?
• Exposure: is the result private and provisional, or external, production-facing, regulated, or decision-driving?

Choose the smallest gate level that controls the material risk:

Level	Use when	Typical gate size
None	Trivial, easily reversible work with an obvious result	No formal table; perform a basic sanity check
Light	Low-impact deliverable with limited uncertainty	1-3 focused checks
Standard	Material deliverable, multi-step workflow, or consequential claim	3-6 hard or advisory gates
Strict	High-stakes, destructive, production, regulated, security-sensitive, or hard-to-reverse work	5-8 gates plus independent or stronger verification where feasible

For a Standard or Strict gate, state one concise sentence connecting the chosen level to the material impact, reversibility, uncertainty, or exposure. Do not expose a synthetic numeric risk score unless the task already has an approved scoring model.

Use a formal gate when at least one of these is present:

• An external or decision-driving deliverable
• A factual, quantitative, completeness, freshness, or provenance claim
• A code, configuration, migration, release, or production change
• A destructive or difficult-to-reverse operation
• A multi-source data collection or transformation workflow
• Legal, medical, financial, privacy, security, or policy consequences
• An explicit request for QA, validation, acceptance criteria, audit, or a quality gate

Do not create gate theater for a simple explanation, brainstorming pass, clearly provisional draft, or tiny reversible formatting change. State that a formal gate is unnecessary when that decision is useful; otherwise just do the sanity check.

2. Build The Task Contract

Before selecting checks, identify:

• Intended outcome and artifact
• Consumer or downstream action
• Explicit constraints and user-supplied acceptance criteria
• Material failure modes
• Unknowns and unavailable evidence
• The exact claim that would justify saying "done"

Use explicit requirements, specifications, policies, contracts, and user constraints as the primary source of thresholds. Ask a concise question only when the answer would materially change a hard threshold or authorize a risky action. Otherwise, use a provisional gate and label the assumption.

3. Derive Task-Specific Gates

Select only dimensions that can change the release decision:

• Correctness: values, logic, calculations, or behavior match the source of truth.
• Completeness: required scope is covered against a defined denominator or inventory.
• Evidence and provenance: important claims trace to current, relevant sources or execution artifacts.
• Functional behavior: the artifact works in the target environment and important paths pass.
• Safety and compliance: destructive, security, privacy, legal, or policy constraints are respected.
• Operational readiness: backup, rollback, observability, ownership, and failure handling are adequate.
• Usability and format: the consumer can read, open, navigate, or act on the result as intended.
• Freshness: time-sensitive inputs and conclusions are current enough for the decision.

Do not automatically use every dimension. A gate that cannot affect acceptance adds noise and weakens attention to the real risks.

For filesystem deletion, overwrite, or move operations, make path containment a hard safety gate. Resolve the approved root and every target to canonical absolute paths, account for links or junctions, and prove each target is a strict descendant of the intended root. A target equal to the root, outside it, or merely sharing its text prefix must fail the gate. Keep evidence-based content classification as a separate criterion so a path can be contained but still protected as source, user data, or an unknown dependency. Before live execution, require a read-only preview of the exact operation set. Skip unknown candidates unless they have an explicit, verified backup or quarantine and a tested recovery path; user permission to delete does not substitute for that evidence. Verify the resulting filesystem and record executed, skipped, and unverified targets before claiming completion.

Threshold Rules

Prefer thresholds in this order:

1. Explicit user requirement, contract, policy, or specification
2. Deterministic test, schema, reference artifact, or authoritative source
3. Established project baseline, service level, or historical control limit
4. A clearly labeled provisional qualitative criterion with human review

Do not invent a percentage, sample size, zero-defect promise, or coverage denominator. If the population is unknown, gate the inventory method and source coverage instead of claiming an unsupported completeness percentage.

4. Place Gates At Decision Boundaries

Use gates where a failure can still change the action:

• Entry gate: inputs, scope, permissions, and prerequisites are sufficient.
• Process gate: intermediate results reveal drift before expensive work continues.
• Release gate: final evidence supports delivery, publication, deployment, deletion, or a completion claim.

Most tasks need only a release gate. Add entry or process gates when later rework would be expensive, destructive, or misleading.

Mark each criterion as:

• Hard: failure blocks the action or completion claim.
• Advisory: failure is disclosed but may be accepted without misrepresenting the result.

5. Execute And Record Evidence

Use the strongest relevant validator already available in the environment: tests, parsers, schema checks, static analysis, visual inspection, source reconciliation, dry runs, checksums, sampling, or independent review.

For each result, record one status:

• PASS: current evidence meets the threshold.
• PASS WITH EXCEPTION: the threshold is missed but an authorized, documented exception permits release.
• FAIL: evidence shows the threshold is not met.
• BLOCKED: a prerequisite or external dependency prevents evaluation or repair.
• NOT EVALUATED: required evidence is unavailable or the check did not run.
• NOT APPLICABLE: the dimension does not apply, with a short reason when not obvious.

Use these overall decisions:

• RELEASE: all hard gates pass.
• RELEASE WITH EXCEPTIONS: hard-gate exceptions are explicit, authorized, and traceable.
• HOLD: any hard gate fails, remains blocked, or is not evaluated without an accepted risk decision.

An exit code, file existence check, or confident narrative is not sufficient evidence unless it directly tests the criterion. Verify the actual artifact and the important claims it contains.

6. Adapt During The Task

Revise the gate contract when scope, inputs, implementation, or risk changes. Do not silently lower a threshold to make the result pass. Record:

• What changed
• Why the existing gate no longer fits
• Who or what authorized the new threshold
• Which evidence must be rerun

When evidence is insufficient, report known facts, candidate hypotheses, verification paths, and temporary mitigation. Mark unverified conclusions.

Reporting

Keep the report proportional to the task. For standard or strict gates, use:

Gate level: <Light | Standard | Strict>
Decision: <RELEASE | RELEASE WITH EXCEPTIONS | HOLD>

| Gate | Severity | Threshold | Method and evidence | Status |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| ... | Hard/Advisory | ... | ... | ... |

Gaps or exceptions:
- ...

Next action:
- ...

For a light gate, a short checklist or one-sentence decision is enough. Do not make the gate report larger than the deliverable it protects.

Anti-Patterns

• Reusing one fixed checklist for unrelated tasks
• Measuring what is easy instead of what controls acceptance
• Claiming completeness without a defined denominator
• Treating missing, stale, or indirect evidence as a pass
• Inventing numeric thresholds to make a gate look objective
• Running every available validator regardless of relevance
• Allowing an advisory issue to silently become a hard failure, or vice versa
• Declaring success before the release gate has run

This skill orchestrates quality decisions; it does not replace domain expertise or domain-specific validators. Use relevant tools and skills to produce the evidence, then apply this gate contract to decide whether the result can ship.