sovereign-overlord-gate

name	sovereign-overlord-gate
description	When an agent needs to stop, roll back, or restrict access for a human — the real mechanisms are require-tier.sh's tier check, human-gate-policy.md's confirmation gate, and git's own revert/reset. Replaces an earlier design that instructed agents to implement ECDSA-P384 signed commands and a "freeze the swarm" API that was never built.
origin	yana-ai (rewritten 2026-07-03 — see "What changed" below)
license	Apache-2.0
version	2.0.0
compatibility	yana-ai >= 0.43.0

Sovereign Overlord Gate

When to Use

• The human wants to restrict a specific command to sovereign/operator-only access
• An agent must block on human confirmation before an irreversible action
• Work needs to be rolled back to a known-good state
• A misbehaving subagent's session needs to end without waiting for it to finish on its own

Do NOT use for

• Routine task approval — use human-gate-policy.md's per-action confirmation directly
• Anything implying a persistent, always-on agent swarm to "freeze" — this repo runs one synchronous session at a time; there is no background process to suspend (see agent-communication-policy.md)

---

The real mechanism: three separate, already-working tools

There is no single "Sovereign Overlord Gate" API to implement. The three things this skill used to bundle into one fictional class (SovereignOverlordGate) are three real, separate, already-working pieces:

Need	Use
Gate a command to a minimum privilege tier	bash core/gates/require-tier.sh sovereign "<command>" — real SHA-256-hashed guest/operator/sovereign check
Block pending human confirmation	core/rules/human-gate-policy.md's human_gate() pattern — a keystroke, not a signed token
Roll back to a known-good state	git revert <sha> or git reset (per git-push-enforcement.md's Rollback Protocol) — gated by the same human-approval rules as any other destructive git operation
End a runaway subagent	Nothing to "quarantine" — a Task-tool subagent either finishes and reports, or the turn ends; there's no long-running process to kill (see subagent-policy.md)

Checking tier before a privileged action

# Real usage — require-tier.sh is a working script, not a design sketch
bash core/gates/require-tier.sh sovereign "git push origin main"
bash core/gates/require-tier.sh operator  "npm test"

YANA_TIER is set by core/gates/identity-gate.sh via a SHA-256 comparison against a hash stored in the script (never a plaintext secret in the repo) — see that file's own header for setup.

Blocking on human confirmation

# human-gate-policy.md's real pattern — a terminal prompt, not a cryptographic exchange
human_gate() {
  local action="$1" detail="$2" risk="${3:-medium}"
  echo "Action: $action"; echo "Detail: $detail"
  read -r answer < /dev/tty
  [[ "$answer" =~ ^[Yy]$ ]] || { echo "Blocked by human gate."; exit 1; }
}

Rolling back

# The real "restore to baseline" — no Merkle snapshot API, just git
git log --oneline -10          # find the known-good commit
git revert HEAD --no-edit      # never force-push, never git reset --hard on shared history
git push

Anti-Fake-Pass Checklist

• Privileged command actually ran through require-tier.sh, not just documented as requiring it
• Irreversible action actually paused for a real human keystroke via human_gate(), not auto-approved
• Rollback used git revert/git reset — never claimed a "Merkle snapshot restore" that doesn't exist in this codebase
• No new signing/token/nonce scheme introduced for this — if a genuine need for cryptographic command authentication ever arises, that's a fresh design proposal, not a revival of this skill's old ECDSA-P384 sketch

What changed

The original version of this skill instructed agents to implement signSovereignCommand()/verifySovereignCommand() (ECDSA-P384 over SHA384, 60-second expiry, nonce-replay tracking), a SovereignOverlordGate class dispatching FREEZE_SWARM/WIPE_AGENT_STATE/FULL_ROLLBACK/RELEASE_QUARANTINE/EMERGENCY_SHUTDOWN, and a SovereignDeadManSwitch class polling hourly for 72 hours of sovereign inactivity. None of that code exists anywhere in this repo, and the skill was teaching agents to write it as if completing a partially-built system — the same gap core/rules/62-sovereign-overlord-gate-law.md and core/rules/50-financial-deadman-switch-law.md had, all three now fixed together on 2026-07-03. The commands this skill exists to serve (restrict access, block-and-confirm, roll back) are real needs with real, already-built answers — see the table above.