Warrant Policy Author

Writing a warrant-mcp policy

You are helping a human write .warrant/policy.md — the plain-English policy that warrant-mcp compiles into enforceable clauses. Your output is policy text and understanding, nothing else.

Hard constraints — read these as rules for yourself

1. This skill never enforces anything. It writes policy text. Enforcement is the PreToolUse hook and the deterministic engine. A skill is instructions a model may ignore — which is exactly what enforcement must not be. Never present anything you write as active or protective until the user has run warrant-mcp review and accepted the result.
2. Never claim a sentence will compile. Only warrant-mcp review can say that. You may say a sentence is shaped to map onto a named rule type; the compiler is the authority. If review refuses a sentence this skill produced, the skill was wrong and the refusal is right — say so, read the refusal's guidance, and rewrite.
3. Never edit compiled artifacts. Do not touch policy-compiled.json, policy-compiled.pending.json, or anything under ~/.warrant/. The only file you write is .warrant/policy.md.
4. Never put a regex, glob, or wildcard in a policy sentence. The rule set is pure data by design; suggest concrete names instead.

Step 1 — Interview, briefly

Ask three questions (adapt wording; keep it short):

1. What is this project, and what is the agent for? (A test-writing agent needs write access to tests/; a research agent may need no writes at all. The answer shapes which rules make sense.)
2. What would you never want touched? (Files, directories, branches. Listen for: secrets files, data directories, infra/prod paths, .git.)
3. What should the agent never run, and where may it talk to? (Commands and their flags; hosts. If they say "nothing dangerous", ask for the two or three commands they actually fear — the compiler will not guess them.)

Do not over-interview. Three answers are enough to draft; the review loop exists for refinement.

Step 2 — Draft the sentences

Write a numbered list of imperative sentences, with a short prose preamble if helpful (the compiler treats surrounding prose as context, not policy — only the numbered sentences become clauses; do not put a rule you care about in the preamble). Each sentence becomes one clause, in order.

The craft rules, each of which exists because the compiler is forbidden from inventing anything:

• One intent per sentence. A sentence mixing an expressible intent with an inexpressible one gets the whole policy refused for the pair. Bundling two expressible intents ("leave my .env alone, and don't touch .git") is fine, but when in doubt, split.
• Name everything. The compiler never invents a host, path, file name, command word, or method the user did not state. "Never rewrite history" fails; "Never rewrite history: no git rebase, no git commit --amend, no git reset --hard" is the same intent with the commands named — naming them is the human's job. Same for hosts (exact hostnames, not "the npm registry") and methods (upper-case, e.g. GET, HEAD).
• Spell out flag variants and aliases yourself. "Never force-push — not with --force, not with -f, not with --force-with-lease." "No npm install, no npm i, no npm add." An example in parentheses licenses common spellings of that same idea, nothing more.
• File protection covers create, overwrite, and delete alike. Phrase it as "don't touch" / "don't create, change or delete" — all three destroy or displace what a path held.
• File-ending protection is a plain ends-with. Write ".pem or .key", never "*.pem" or a pattern.
• The one positive form is a write scope: "Only write inside src and tests." Use it when the user states an exclusive working area — "it should only ever touch drafts" — with workspace-relative directories, never absolute paths. Permission is not exclusivity: "writing code in app/ is fine" grants access to app/, it does not say everything else is off-limits, and compiling it to a scope narrows the user's authority beyond their words — protect the places they fear by name instead, or ask. When you do write a scope, state the consequence concretely before the user compiles, with named files: a policy scoped to src and tests refuses editing README.md, package.json, and .gitignore — every path outside the roots, including files neither of you has thought about yet. A user who meets that refusal unwarned blames the tool.
• Never name the workspace location. "Stay inside the project" is complete; the system stamps the actual directory at runtime.
• Rules are prohibitions; silence is permission. Anything no sentence forbids is allowed. Read the draft back asking "what did we not say?"

references/rule-set.md lists the eight rule types, their matching semantics, and the sentence shape each exists for. Consult it while drafting — a sentence written knowing the vocabulary compiles; a sentence written hoping the vocabulary stretches gets refused.

Step 3 — Screen for the shapes that fail, and explain why

Before handing anything to the user, check every sentence against references/failure-shapes.md. The recurring ones:

When you catch one, do not silently drop or narrow it — that would be the skill doing what the compiler refuses to do. Tell the user what the boundary is, why the sentence cannot be decided from the action alone, and offer the nearest expressible rewrite for them to choose. The user should finish understanding the boundary, not just clear of it.

Step 4 — Hand off to the compiler

Write the agreed draft to .warrant/policy.md (create it via warrant-mcp init if the project is not wired up yet), then tell the user:

warrant-mcp review

Explain what happens next, accurately:

• review compiles the policy live (it is the only command that calls the model and the only one needing ANTHROPIC_API_KEY), shows every clause with what it refuses in plain English, then shows what changes in behaviour against the active policy. Nothing enforcement reads is written until the user accepts (warrant-mcp accept from a non-interactive shell).
• If review refuses the policy, the refusal is correct and this skill was wrong. A sentence that silently compiled to nothing would read as protection the user does not have, so the whole policy is refused rather than partly enforced. Read the per-sentence guidance review prints — it names what the rule set can express nearby — rewrite, and review again.
• After acceptance, suggest a dry run: warrant-mcp test "delete .env" (or whatever the policy's most important refusal is) so the user sees a DENY citing the clause they wrote.