| name | overlay-governance |
| description | Govern reusable workflow overlay changes: skills, AGENTS overlays, adapters, role/prompt contracts, validation checks, and reusable agent-policy ownership. Use when changing overlay structure or deciding where agent workflow policy belongs. Use this skill for overlay contracts only; it does not own project facts, product architecture, runtime commands, active work, or project-only exceptions. |
Overlay Governance
Owns reusable workflow overlay posture, project-overlay contracts, adapter
posture, skill architecture, and overlay checks.
Contract
This repository is a reusable workflow overlay: skills, role adapters, prompt
inputs, templates, helper commands, and checks that fit agent work to local
practice.
The overlay is a contract, not a project playbook. It owns reusable
agent-facing workflow policy and tooling; projects own product facts, runtime
shape, local command bodies, roadmap, queue state, active execution state, and
project-only exceptions.
Keep overlay policy adapter-neutral unless it lives in an adapter file. Adapter
files may name runtime-specific mechanics.
Write overlay policy under documentation-stewardship: shortest enforceable
rule that preserves owner, outcome, forbidden workaround, and proof or stop
condition when needed. Avoid inherited process stacks.
Apply its density rule to skills, adapter prompts, examples, validation docs,
and project-overlay contracts.
Rules
- Required overlay gates are blocking. Use
pass, reject, blocked, or
not-applicable; do not make required rule, proof, review, runtime,
architecture, solution-shaping, or validation failures advisory.
NON-BLOCKING is an observation category, not a code-review verdict. It is
valid only outside the binding objective or for explicitly accepted temporary
debt with owner, risk, and removal condition.- Keep
AGENTS.md and skill bodies as maps/contracts, not manuals.
- Frontmatter
description owns ordinary trigger/routing text: purpose,
positive triggers, and likely exclusions.
- Skill bodies are post-selection contracts.
- Reference rows are mandatory purpose gates; matched gates must be read, and
unmatched references must not be loaded speculatively.
- Follow
documentation-stewardship for one-owner durable concepts. Overlay
skills, adapters, and bootstrap docs may repeat only compressed owner
pointers plus local load, input, output, or stop consequences.
- Closed work notes are not durable doctrine. After extraction to the real
owner or valid backlog, durable docs must not depend on closed work notes.
- Treat duplicate doctrine as a review concern. Do not add exact-phrase
validators for documentation ownership; use positive current structure and
reviewer judgment instead.
- Delete, collapse, demote, or reuse before adding overlay structure.
- Exceptions need an owner, protected surface, and removal condition.
Non-trivial overlay changes touch AGENTS.md, reusable skills or metadata,
adapter prompts/config, validation checks, workflow policy, project-overlay
contracts, or reusable policy ownership.
Overlay closeout names changed reusable owners, removed obsolete routes, changed
routing triggers, overlay repo status, and project repo status when overlays
also changed.
Reference Gates
- Read
references/overlay-contracts.md before changing project overlays,
AGENTS.md, project-overlay documentation layout, or governance check
semantics.
- Read
references/skill-architecture.md before changing skill authoring,
splitting, installing, metadata, reference rows, templates, helper commands,
validation, skill eval posture, or split proposals.
Check
agent-harness governance check --repo-root .
When this skill changes, validation plus readback must prove owner boundary,
non-trivial classification, closeout obligations, and reference gates survive.
