Audit governance
Portable, single-purpose skills for coding agents that orient, map, plan, review, and reason over your code — read / plan / report, never editing behind your back.
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What its author says it does
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Use when an agent needs to test governance prose against what a project actually enforces; classifies claims as structural or judgment and recommends dissolve, convert, keep, or defer rather than editing documents or adding checks.
SKILL.md
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Audit governance
Use this skill to challenge a project's governance prose against what the project actually enforces, and decide what each claim should become. The test is enforcement: prose that a mechanism already holds is redundant and can dissolve; prose that asserts a checkable property no mechanism holds can convert into one; prose that carries a human judgment cannot, and stays.
It produces a per-claim disposition plan with reasoning; a human decides and acts on it.
Governing intuition: governance prose is debt to be discharged into enforcement — but only where the property is structural, and only when a real forcing function has arrived. Most honest passes conclude "leave it": a disciplined challenge protects load-bearing prose and resists premature rules as often as it removes redundancy.
Input: the governance prose to interrogate (a charter, ADRs, PROJECT.md, README claims, style/lint rules, or a decision log) — if unspecified, ask which artifact; locate the enforcement surface before classifying any claim.
Boundary: plans only — produces a per-claim disposition plan; does not rewrite documents, delete prose, or add tests/checks.
Workflow
Phase 0: Scope the prose and locate the enforcement surface
- Identify the governance artifact(s) to interrogate (charter, ADRs,
PROJECT.md, README claims, style/lint rules, a decision log). - Identify what enforces claims in this project: tests, CI checks, the type system, linters, schema validation, runtime assertions, a self-governance/self-check suite, generated-and-pinned artifacts. This is where projects differ — every project enforces differently.
- Read the governance's own decision log and exclusions first. Many "consolidate / sink / DRY / retire" reframes are already-decided; do not re-litigate a standing rejection. Grep for the relevant decisions before endorsing any change.
- Enumerate the discrete claims to interrogate — the individual prose assertions in the artifact(s), each captured as a checkable proposition with its quote and location. These are the units Phase 1 classifies.
Phase 1: Partition each claim — structural vs judgment
For every substantive/candidate prose claim, classify it (see references/disposition.md for the full tests):
| Kind | Test | Consequence |
|---|---|---|
| Structural | Mechanically checkable against an artifact (code, config, the declared model) without reading intent | Candidate for enforcement; prose may be redundant |
| Judgment | Requires reading human intent / rationale / a value call | Must stay prose — a check here is a false-negative engine |
The partition is the load-bearing move. Getting it wrong in the structural direction manufactures a gameable check that gives false assurance.
Phase 2: Disposition each claim
| Disposition | When | Recommended action |
|---|---|---|
| DISSOLVE | Structural and already enforced, and the prose merely indexes/restates it (a coordinate, count, cross-reference, or verbatim copy that rots on edit) | Remove the redundant prose; point the reader to the enforced source or its generated projection |
| CONVERT | Structural but not yet enforced (or only partially — see the coverage trap) | Recommend a check; name the concrete observation source it would read |
| KEEP | Judgment, rationale, rejected alternatives, lineage, or a stable human-language invariant summary | Stays prose; it has no observation source, and readers benefit from seeing it inline |
| DEFER | Structural-and-convertible but no forcing function yet (it has not drifted; no second consumer) | Born-when-built; codifying now is infrastructure-ahead-of-need and builds a gaming target |
The coverage trap: before calling a claim enforced, confirm the mechanism covers the whole claim, not just one direction of it (see references/disposition.md Test 3).
Phase 3: Adversarially verify the plan
Before finalizing, attack the plan from independent lenses (see references/disposition.md for each lens's full mandate). Use separate reviewers only when the host offers them; otherwise reason through each lens directly:
- Loophole — can a disguised violation pass a proposed CONVERT check?
- Consistency — does any disposition contradict a standing decision or silently narrow the charter?
- Necessity — is the forcing function real, or is this premature?
Record the honest bound: green and plausible do not prove. A standard gate may not exercise the claim; state where confidence ends.
Phase 4: Produce the disposition plan
Output a table and hand off — do not edit:
## Governance Disposition Plan
**Artifact**: [what was interrogated]
**Enforcement surface**: [tests / CI / types / self-check / …]
**Standing decisions checked**: [yes — relevant entries | none found]
| Claim (quote + location) | Kind | Disposition | Reason | Observation source / What would be lost | Confidence |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| … | structural/judgment | dissolve/convert/keep/defer | … | … | high/med/low |
## Verdict
[e.g. "3 dissolve, 1 convert (deferred — no forcing function), rest keep. Net: the charter is
already well-migrated; recommend only the 3 pure prose removals."]
Rules
- Analysis only. Do not edit governance docs, delete prose, or add checks — recommend; the human decides and acts.
- Convert a claim to a check only if it is soundly checkable; a judgment forced into a check is a false-negative engine — the one failure this skill must not cause.
- Never dissolve load-bearing prose (rationale, rejected alternatives, lineage, a stable invariant summary). Only indexes/restatements that rot on edit dissolve.
- Respect the forcing function: do not recommend codifying a rule ahead of a real need, and do not build a positive checklist that future contributors can game.
- Check the governance's own standing decisions and exclusions before endorsing any sink/consolidate/ retire reframe.
- State partial-coverage gaps explicitly; do not treat "looks enforced" as "enforced".
- Stay in lane; hand off at the boundary. This skill plans governance disposition. When a
"consolidate / DRY" reframe turns out to target duplicated code rather than prose, point to
plan-splitfor the behaviour-preserving decomposition. When the audit surfaces an unresolved contradiction between requirements or parties rather than a prose-vs-enforcement mismatch, point toresolve-deadlock. For assessing extractable conversation knowledge, point toassess-knowledge; for persisting mature conversation knowledge, point tosave-knowledge. Name the handoff rather than half-doing the other skill's job.