Gate Management

Gate Management

Intro

A Gate is a validation checkpoint — "code review passed", "tests green", "security scan clean", "stakeholder signed off". Processes reference gates to declare what has to be true before a step can complete.

MCP server. This skill ships a self-contained MCP server at mcp/server.py (PEP 723 script — requires uv and Python ≥ 3.10 on PATH). Agent harnesses reach its tools by reading a single MCP config file at startup, so the contents of mcp/mcp-config.json must be merged into the harness's MCP config and placed at the harness-specific path before this skill is usable. If processkit was installed by an installer, that wiring is the installer's responsibility; if processkit was installed manually, the project owner must do it by hand.

Overview

Shape

---
apiVersion: processkit.projectious.work/v1
kind: Gate
metadata:
  id: GATE-code-review
  created: 2026-04-06T00:00:00Z
spec:
  name: code-review
  description: "At least one reviewer has approved the change."
  kind: manual           # manual | automated | hybrid
  validator: "A second actor reviews and approves."
  required_roles: [reviewer]
  blocking: true         # if false, gate is advisory only
---

Workflow

1. Pick GATE-<name> where name is a short noun phrase.
2. Set kind: manual (human does it), automated (check runs automatically), or hybrid (both).
3. Describe the validator — the concrete check. One or two sentences.
4. List required_roles if specific actors must do the validation.
5. Set blocking: true for hard gates (cannot proceed), false for advisory.

Gate outcomes

Gates emit LogEntries when they are evaluated:

• gate.passed — validation succeeded
• gate.failed — validation failed (include failure details)
• gate.waived — validation was bypassed (include details.waived_by and reason)

Gotchas

Agent-specific failure modes — provider-neutral pause-and-self-check items:

• Defining a Gate without an evaluator. A Gate that says "code review passed" but doesn't say HOW that's checked is decoration, not a checkpoint. Every Gate must have either an automated check (script, MCP tool, CI job) or a clearly named manual approver.
• Auto-approving manual gates. If a Gate is kind: manual, the agent does NOT have authority to mark it passed. Surface the gate to the user, ask for explicit approval, and only then call evaluate_gate with the approver's ACTOR-ID.
• Missing the rollback path on failure. Every Gate that can fail must specify what happens when it does — block the process, page oncall, escalate, defer to a different gate. A Gate that fails silently is worse than no gate.
• Writing gates that are too coarse. "Tests pass" is too vague — which suite? Which subset? With what coverage threshold? Granularity matters because the agent needs to know what specifically is being checked when the gate is invoked.
• Forgetting to log gate.passed / gate.failed / gate.waived. These events are how the audit trail tracks process health. If you evaluate a gate without logging the outcome, the index can't answer "how often does this gate fail" or "who waived it last".
• Hand-waving "automated" gates that aren't actually wired. If kind: automated, the evaluator must exist and be runnable from the agent's environment. Marking a gate automated when it actually requires a human is a process failure dressed as a technical one.
• Treating gate failures as warnings. Gates are blockers by design. If a Gate fails, the dependent process step does NOT proceed, even under pressure. If the user wants to bypass, that's a gate.waived event with the waiver's name and reason — never an unrecorded continuation.

Full reference

Fields

Binding gates to processes

Use a Binding (type: process-gate) to apply a gate to a specific process, optionally scoped:

kind: Binding
spec:
  type: process-gate
  subject: PROC-release
  target: GATE-security-scan
  scope: SCOPE-project-x

This way the same Gate can apply to multiple processes, and the mapping changes without editing the Gate or Process files.

Waiving a gate

If a blocking gate is bypassed, log gate.waived with details.waived_by (actor ID), details.reason, and details.expires_at. Do not edit the Gate definition — the waiver is an event, not a property.