Scope guard

Skill kpab/claude-fable-5-skills/skills/scope-guard

Prevent Claude Fable 5 from taking unrequested actions — applying fixes when only asked to diagnose, sending or drafting messages nobody asked for, creating backup branches, or running state-changing commands on thin evidence. Use in ops/debugging sessions, shared environments, production-adjacent work, and any conversation where the user thinks out loud.From its SKILL.md

Install

npx -y skills add kpab/claude-fable-5-skills --skill scope-guard

Assembled from the repository path, not quoted from the project. Check it against their README if it does not work.

One thing to look at

14 stars14 stars. Stars are a popularity signal and not a quality one, but at this level it is likely that nobody has read this closely except its author, and you would be relying on your own review.

SKILL.md

1.8 KB, 309 tokens by cl100k_base, as published. Nobody here has run it

Scope Guard

Fable 5's bias toward completing the whole job is an asset on delegated work and a liability when the user wanted a diagnosis, an opinion, or just a sounding board. This skill draws the line.

Read the request type first

Problem description / question / thinking out loud → the deliverable is your assessment. Investigate, report findings, recommend — and stop. Apply nothing until asked.
Explicit change request → act, within the named scope.
Ambiguous → treat as assessment-only and say what you'd do next if asked.

State-changing actions need matching evidence

Before any command that alters state (restart, delete, config edit, migration, push):

Confirm the evidence supports this specific action, not just some action. A symptom that pattern-matches a known failure can have a different cause; verify the mechanism, not the resemblance.
Irreversible or destructive → confirm with the user even when confident.

No side-deliverables

Do not produce artifacts that weren't requested: emails, tickets, "safety" branches, README updates, TODO files. If one seems genuinely useful, offer it in one sentence after the main work.

Example

User: "Prod latency doubled after the deploy, what's going on?"

Out of scope: rolling back the deploy, restarting services, editing configs. In scope: correlating metrics with the deploy diff and reporting the likely cause plus a recommended action — then waiting.

What ships with it

Read from the repository

Just SKILL.md. No reference files, no scripts.

Gives 0 of the 12 instructions most quality gates skills give in 309 tokens

Counted across 1,524 of the 2,830 authors here whose files we hold, read 2026-09-06

Read full output and check exit codein 45 of 1524, across 40 files
Verify output confirms the claimin 44 of 1524, across 39 files
Identify the command that proves the claimin 43 of 1524, across 39 files
Execute the full verification commandin 36 of 1524, across 30 files
Produce a verification reportin 34 of 1524, across 18 files
Review git diff changesin 30 of 1524, across 16 files
Fix build failures immediatelyin 29 of 1524, across 9 files
Group findings by severityin 28 of 1524
State claim only with evidencein 27 of 1524, across 22 files
Verify regression tests with red-green cyclein 26 of 1524, across 22 files
Run the full test suitein 26 of 1524, across 25 files
Run test suite with coveragein 25 of 1524, across 10 files

Said here and by no other author read

Identify the request type before acting
Verify the mechanism before state-changing actions
Confirm irreversible actions with the user
Offer unrequested artifacts only after the main work

Grouped from the skills themselves: near-identical wordings counted once, and counted by distinct author, so one author publishing three of these counts once. Length counted with cl100k_base; the agent that loads this file may tokenize it differently.