| name | symbol |
| description | In D&D, Symbol inscribes a powerful glyph with a predefined effect — death, fear, sleep, stunning — that triggers when conditions are met. Unlike Glyph of Warding (which protects a specific place or object), Symbol marks a conceptual boundary with a named policy. The real-world version is semantic policy tagging: marking a database column as PII so access triggers audit logging, tagging a deployment as HIPAA-scoped so changes require compliance review, or labeling an API endpoint as rate-limited-aggressive so traffic spikes trigger automatic throttling. The symbol is the policy, and the policy enforces itself. |
| user-invocable | true |
Symbol
Mark a resource with a named sigil that triggers automatic policy enforcement when conditions are met.
Overview
Symbol is interpreted here as a literal spell with a shipping-now execution model.
Canonical source: Symbol (spell)
Provider target: OpenClaw
When To Use
- A resource, role, or state needs a machine-readable tag that carries enforcement with it wherever it appears.
- Audit logging, throttling, approval gates, or compliance review should trigger automatically from classification.
- You need a named policy marker that expresses semantic scope, not just a location-bound tripwire.
Workflow
- Identify the resource, role, or state to mark and the policy the symbol should represent.
- Define the trigger conditions, enforcement actions, owner, and scope of the symbol.
- Apply the symbol as a machine-readable tag or classification that downstream systems can detect.
- Test visibility and precedence against existing policies so the sigil is legible and deterministic.
- Return the symbol definition, enforcement paths, and failure modes.
Deliverables
- A named policy symbol with scope, owner, and machine-readable definition.
- Trigger conditions and automatic enforcement actions.
- A precedence and visibility note covering conflicts, auditability, and blind spots.
Guardrails
- Symbols must be visible to the people they constrain. Hidden policy enforcement without disclosure is a trap, not a safeguard.
- Every symbol needs a defined scope and an owner. Policy tags that outlive their original context become governance ghosts — still triggering, no longer understood.
- Do not stack conflicting symbols on the same resource without explicit precedence rules.
Default Invocation
Use $symbol to mark this resource, role, or state with a named policy sigil that triggers automatic enforcement when conditions are met.
