| name | safety-guard |
| tier | 2 |
| description | Enforces Law 3 (One Thing at a Time) of the 7 Laws of AI Agent Discipline by scoping edits to a directory and blocking destructive shell commands. Use this skill to prevent destructive operations when working on production systems or running agents autonomously. |
| origin | continuous-improvement |
| disable-model-invocation | true |
Safety Guard — Prevent Destructive Operations
When to Use
- When working on production systems
- When agents are running autonomously (full-auto mode)
- When you want to restrict edits to a specific directory
- During sensitive operations (migrations, deploys, data changes)
How It Works
Three modes of protection:
Mode 1: Careful Mode
Intercepts destructive commands before execution and warns:
Watched patterns:
- rm -rf (especially /, ~, or project root)
- git push --force
- git reset --hard
- git checkout . (discard all changes)
- DROP TABLE / DROP DATABASE
- docker system prune
- kubectl delete
- chmod 777
- sudo rm
- npm publish (accidental publishes)
- Any command with --no-verify
When detected: shows what the command does, asks for confirmation, suggests safer alternative.
Mode 2: Freeze Mode
Locks file edits to a specific directory tree:
/safety-guard freeze src/components/
Any Write/Edit outside src/components/ is blocked with an explanation. Useful when you want an agent to focus on one area without touching unrelated code.
Mode 3: Guard Mode (Careful + Freeze combined)
Both protections active. Maximum safety for autonomous agents.
/safety-guard guard --dir src/api/ --allow-read-all
Agents can read anything but only write to src/api/. Destructive commands are blocked everywhere.
Unlock
/safety-guard off
Implementation
Currently implemented as skill-side discipline: when restricted-mode is active, the agent reads this skill and refuses Bash, Write, Edit, and MultiEdit calls that violate the rules before invoking the tool. There is no bundled tool-call gate today — the same enforcement gap that existed for gateguard before issue #106 / PR #108. A future runtime version would track via a follow-up issue.
Integration
- Enable by default for
codex -a never sessions
- Pair with observability risk scoring in continuous-improvement v2
- Logs all blocked actions to
~/.claude/safety-guard.log
