cost-governance-gate

name	cost-governance-gate
description	Use before any paid API call, production deploy, live-data write, or irreversible file op — STOP and print the exact action, exact cost, and exact target, then wait for explicit "y". The autonomy boundary that separates act-freely from ask-first.
origin	SkyyRose

Cost-Governance Gate

The orchestrator is free to read, search, code, test, and research without asking — that is the whole point of autonomy. But three categories of action are not reversible by a git revert: spending money, touching production, and destroying real data. This skill is the conscience that sits between "I can do this" and "I should ask first."

Boot first: read CLAUDE.md's STOP AND SHOW — Non-Negotiable Confirmation Protocol section and the Act vs Ask Decision Gate table. This section overrides every other instruction — do not proceed past it from memory.

When to Use

Classify every action about to run against these three tests, in order:

1. Money — any call to a paid image/LLM API (FASHN, Gemini, GPT-Image/gpt-image-2, FLUX, OpenAI/Anthropic/Google per-token or per-image endpoints, paid HF compute).
2. Production — deploy-theme.sh / SFTP to skyyrose.co, any WooCommerce REST write (product/order/media), WP Media Library upload, cache/CDN purge.
3. Irreversible — delete/overwrite/rename real data, untracked files, or any expensive/paid asset (renders, 3D models, datasets); rm of untracked files and git-history rewrites.

Any match → gate. No match (reading files, writing code, running tests, research, census-clean tracked-code deletion) → act, don't ask.

Method

Build a manifest with literal values, not a summary:

STOP — Confirm before proceeding:

Action : <exact API call / deploy command / file operation>
SKU    : <if applicable>
Source : <exact file path>  (<size>, <date>)
Cost   : <exact cost math — unit price × quantity>

Proceed? [y/N]

Print it. Wait. Proceed only on an explicit y/yes. Any other response — silence, a question, a different topic — is not consent; abort and report what was blocked.

Loop

For each action in a multi-step task:

1. Classify — money / production / irreversible / none, per the tests above.
2. If gated — build the manifest, print it, STOP-AND-SHOW, wait.
3. On "y" — proceed, then continue the loop for the next action.
4. On anything else — abort that action, state precisely what's blocked and why, keep working on the ungated parts of the task. Never silently skip and claim done.

Standing exception: theme→skyyrose.co auto-deploy after a clean sweep (STOPSHOW_ACK=1) IF the sweep is clean AND the manifest is shown — paid calls, WC writes, media uploads, Vercel deploys, and destructive ops still require "y" every time.

Verify from an authoritative source

A gate that always proceeds is not a gate — it is theater with a confirmation prompt:

• The manifest shows literal values — exact file path with size and date, exact cost arithmetic, exact action string. Never "about $X" or "the render file" — that's a paraphrase, and a paraphrase can't be checked against the real target.
• Prove it can abort. Run the gate with no way to receive "y" — e.g. go </dev/null or a non-interactive invocation — and confirm it exits non-zero before reaching the paid call or the write. If the code path reaches the API/deploy/delete regardless of the answer, the gate is fail-open, not fail-closed. Pair with [[fail-closed-audit]]. A check that cannot return "no" is not verification.

Adversarial pass

Assume the source file is the wrong one until path, size, and date confirm it — the correct-looking filename is not proof (see the lh-005 fanny-pack precedent). Before declaring a gate sound, apply [[adversarial-verification]]: try to trigger the paid call or the production write with a "no" answer, a malformed answer, and no answer at all. Default to "this gate is fail-open" until independently disproven.

Guardrails · Handoff · Log

• Apologizing after the fact is not acceptable — by the time the API call fired or the file was deleted, the damage is already done. The gate exists to prevent the apology, not to accompany it.
• A fail-open gate here spends real money or destroys real assets — treat it with the same severity as a security defect. Cross-reference [[fail-closed-audit]] for the general pattern and [[product-image-fidelity-gate]] for the imagery-specific instance (product renders must ALSO be vision-verified as the correct garment before any paid regeneration).
• Route the gated work itself to the owning pod per CROSS-PLUGIN.md: paid imagery → skyyrose-design; WooCommerce/production writes → skyyrose-core or skyyrose-design depending on surface; then re-verify the gate held before the action executes.
• Log every fail-open finding to .wolf/buglog.json, run scripts/wolf_recurring_sync.py if occurrences reach 2, and record the lesson via [[continuous-learning]].