/gate-check

name: gate-check
description: "Advisor-checked decision gates. Freezes a drafted option set, has an independent external advisor rule it genuine / collapsed / malformed, then verifies the cited grounds before it reaches the user."

Gate Check

An option set is normally judged by whoever drafted it. That is the one judgment the drafter cannot make well: the options inherit the frame they were drafted from, so an option set standing on the wrong axis looks complete from inside. This skill puts an independent adjudicator on the option set itself — not on the work the gate is about — and then checks the adjudicator's reasoning against the substrate before either reaches you.

The check separates two things that usually collapse into one: **who wrote the options** and **who says they are worth asking**. Everything below exists to keep those apart, including from itself.

Caller Signature

/gate-check [gate?] [advisor?]

gate    : (implicit) | explicit draft   -- optional; defaults to the gate drafted in the current turn
advisor : { codex }                     -- optional; the independent adjudicator behind the
                                        --   (gate question, frozen option set, settled
                                        --    constraints, pointers)
                                        --   → { axis reading, falsifier, a ground cited for every
                                        --      conclusion asserted, and either a verdict — with
                                        --      what a collapse reduces to, or what axis a
                                        --      malformed relocates onto — or, where none of the
                                        --      three fits, the members it could not clear with
                                        --      the repairs available and what each changes }
                                        --      interface

The advisor is a parameter, not the identity. Any adjudicator satisfying that interface can drive the check, provided it is a genuinely separate reasoner — a second pass by the drafting agent does not satisfy it, because the independence is the whole mechanism.

Pipeline Overview

/gate-check [gate?] [advisor?]
  Phase 0 : screen + freeze     -- eligible gate? → freeze the option set verbatim, capture a substrate anchor
  Phase 1 : launch ∥ precommit  -- dispatch to the advisor (background), then record the expected
                                   controlling sources and verification criteria BEFORE any advisor
                                   output is visible
  Phase 2 : verify              -- collect the advisor's own words; check each cited ground against
                                   the substrate; check whether its stated falsifier could have
                                   defeated the reading and whether it is there
  Phase 3 : dispose             -- genuine | collapse | malformed | indeterminate | failed
  Phase 4 : synthesize          -- on a settled repair: rebuild the option set under the synthesis guards,
                                   then one external recheck, bounded
  present                       -- three vantage points always; ground-by-ground detail folds to one line
  observer                      -- armed for the session; every cycle converges or fails explicitly

When to Use

• A gate has been drafted whose options are competing approaches, orderings, or scopes, and it is not obvious whether they are genuinely different choices
• A decision keeps feeling like a choice while every option leads to the same place
• A gate that already fired produced an answer that did not settle anything, suggesting the axis was wrong
• An absence carries the option set — that no rule covers this, that nothing else fits, that it cannot be done in one pass. An absence leaves nothing behind to notice it by, so it reads as true off any summary of the ground; only the ground itself separates an absence that was checked from one that was assumed

When NOT to Use

• The decision is already settled by something citable — say so and proceed
• The gate has one option; there is no set to adjudicate

Both are conditions of the screen below, listed here too because they are reasons not to reach for the skill at all rather than only reasons it declines.

Eligibility and Exclusions

The check applies to gates that **route a reversible decision**. A decision is reversible when correcting it at the next interaction leaves no persistent state change, lost context, outward-facing commitment, or divergent downstream work.

These are the screen. A gate meeting any of them leaves the check, regardless of what verdict the advisor would have returned — but not all of them leave the same way, and firing them all as gates would put back the very asks the screen just caught. The first four leave as gates and fire on their own terms: they are real decisions the check has no standing over. The last two leave as something other than a gate — a decision already settled is relayed with the source that settles it, and a set down to one option is simply the thing it names, done. Where a gate meets conditions from both halves, the first half wins: an irreversible or environment-mutating decision stays a gate however settled its direction or however few options are left, since what those two conditions protect is a confirmation, and a relay is exactly the thing that skips one. Report every condition that applied, not only the one that decided. Everything elsewhere in this document that speaks of "the screen" means this list, and means all of it — no other passage carries a count of its own, because a count kept in two places drifts in one of them.

• **Gates that measure you rather than route a decision** — comprehension checks and recognition prompts, where a single correct option is the design rather than a defect
• **Options turning on private preference** — where the deciding weight