Abstention escalation

Skill jasontang-ai/acp/skills/abstention-escalation

ACP is a reusable democratic coordination primitive for discussion under load. Relay is the reference implementation used to validate that primitive in practice.

Install

npx -y skills add jasontang-ai/acp --skill abstention-escalation

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One thing to look at

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What its author says it does

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Use this skill when ACP outputs have low confidence, medium/high critic risk, or require facilitator review before release.

SKILL.md

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What this skill is for

Use this skill to decide when ACP should abstain, request revision, or route a decision to a human facilitator.

Constitutional purpose

Preserve safe refusal and human-steerable escalation when evidence, confidence, or institutional authority is insufficient for automatic release.

Failure modes targeted

Unsafe automation under uncertainty
Low-confidence release
Critic override pressure
Authority mismatch between system output and human responsibility

When to use it

Engine confidence is low.
Omission or fairness critic severity is medium or high.
Release would exceed load, bridge, or explanation constraints.

When not to use it

Do not use it to hide inconvenient outputs.
Do not use it as a generic error handler.
Do not use it to bypass operator accountability.

Inputs expected

Critic severities
Confidence score
Release recommendation
Operator review context

Required evidence for valid use

Concrete critic or confidence signals, not only vague discomfort
The proposed action whose safety is under review
Enough operator context to know whether escalation is evidence-related, fairness-related, or authority-related

Preflight / prerequisites

Confirm critic outputs are present.
Confirm the proposed action has not already been taken.
Identify whether the escalation is about evidence, safety, fairness, or operator authority.

Workflow

Read critic findings and confidence.
Classify action: release, review, revise, abstain.
Name the concrete reason.
Produce operator handoff notes.

Decision rules / judgment criteria

High critic severity means no automatic release.
Low confidence requires review even if the digest looks polished.
Abstention should preserve unresolved disagreement.

Escalation rules

Escalate to facilitator review when confidence is low, critic severity is high, source references are missing, or institutional authority is required.

Available scripts

scripts/smoke.mjs: emits escalation action labels and expected inputs.

Produced artifacts

Action classification
Escalation reason
Operator handoff notes

Allowed claims

That ACP should release, revise, abstain, or escalate under the supplied evidence
That the remaining uncertainty requires human review
That confidence or critic severity is insufficient for automatic release

Forbidden claims

That abstention is unnecessary because the output looks polished
That escalation can be skipped because a benchmark or model score is high
That abstention by itself resolves the underlying civic disagreement

Human override points

Facilitator signoff on release after escalation
Manual abstention confirmation when authority is contested
Human decision on whether revision is enough or full escalation is required

Outputs

Action classification
Escalation reason
Operator handoff notes

Failure handling

If critic evidence is missing, state that confidence cannot be assessed.

Trust / safety notes

Abstention is a strength of ACP. Do not frame it as system failure when the evidence is genuinely uncertain.

Composition notes

Use after omission and fairness review, before release or conference packaging.

Examples to inspect next

Read examples/casebook.md for release, review, abstain, and anti-pattern examples.

Evaluation hooks

Run scripts/smoke.mjs and npm run skills:audit.