Home / athola / claude-night-market · plugins/imbue/skills/scope-guard/SKILL.md · GitHub

scope-guard skillA

scope-guard is agent-read markdown (skill) from athola/claude-night-market: Scores feature worthiness and enforces branch-size limits against overengineering. Use when evaluating whether a feature belongs in the current scope or branch..

Indexed from public GitHub and served as immutable, content-addressed versions. Install it pinned to an exact SHA-256 with the mdr CLI, and every file is verified against the hash recorded here before it reaches your agent. The deterministic audit below grades the latest version, and the same file always earns the same grade.

What the file says

> The cheapest feature is the one you never build.
> Scope-guard weighs each proposed feature against its value,
> its cost, and the branch budget, so only what is earned ships.

# Scope Guard

Prevents overengineering by both Claude and human during the
brainstorm, plan, and execute workflow. Forces explicit evaluation of
every proposed feature against business value, opportunity cost, and
branch constraints.

## Philosophy

**Core Belief:** Not all features deserve implementation. Most ideas should be deferred to backlog until proven necessary.

**Three Pillars:**
1. **Worthiness Scoring** - Quantify value vs cost before building
2. **Opportunity Cost** - Compare against existing backlog
3. **Branch Discipline** - Respect size thresholds

## When To Use

- During brainstorming sessions before documenting designs
- During planning sessions before finalizing implementation plans
- When evaluating "should we add this?" decisions
- Automatically via hooks when branches approach thresholds
- When proposing new features, abstractions, or patterns

## When NOT To Use

- Bug fixes with clear, bounded scope
- Documentation-only changes
- Trivial single-file edits (< 50 lines)
…

Read the whole file at its exact version.

How to install

Latest version
mdr add athola/claude-night-market/scope-guard@git:20260902.4a35d69
Exact content
mdr add athola/claude-night-market/scope-guard@sha256:1f9c63cbe160992b

Pin to a label to follow the author's releases, or to a sha256 to freeze the exact bytes forever. Either way the resolved hash is written to mdr.lock, and mdr install reproduces it on any machine.

Badge

mdr badge

[![mdr](https://markdownregistry.com/badge/art_znq6dad5s42ghwle.svg)](https://markdownregistry.com/a/art_znq6dad5s42ghwle)

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Versions

versioncommittedcommitsizeaudit
git:20260902.4a35d69 latest2026-09-02 4a35d69 9,137 BA view · diff
git:20260622.c7c8f6f2026-06-22 c7c8f6f 10,645 BA view · diff
git:20260606.1ea234f2026-06-06 1ea234f 9,871 BA view · diff
git:20260521.6f5c7d92026-05-21 6f5c7d9 9,876 BA view · diff
git:20260508.c09f1472026-05-08 c09f147 9,791 BA view

Audit of the latest version

A  17 of 17 checks passed. Deterministic, no model, same answer every run.
  • pass: Frontmatter block present
  • pass: Frontmatter declares a name
  • pass: Frontmatter declares a description
  • pass: Size between 200 bytes and 200 KB (9137 bytes)
  • pass: No zero-width or bidi control characters
  • pass: No instruction hidden inside an HTML comment
  • pass: No link to an exfiltration or paste host
  • pass: No credential-shaped string
  • pass: No instruction to send local credentials anywhere
  • pass: No text hidden with inline styles
  • pass: No prompt-injection phrasing
  • pass: No curl or wget piped into a shell
  • pass: No recursive delete of root, home or parent
  • pass: No instruction to read or print local credentials
  • pass: No base64 blob over 200 characters
  • pass: No link to a raw IP address
  • pass: No script tag

Source

GitHub

athola/claude-night-market · 338 stars · license MIT · pushed 2026-09-22 · branch master

API

GET https://markdownregistry.com/api/v1/artifacts/art_znq6dad5s42ghwle
GET https://markdownregistry.com/api/v1/resolve?ref=athola/claude-night-market/scope-guard
GET https://markdownregistry.com/api/v1/blob/1f9c63cbe160992b200e3800d02d4bdd2f63ff303f557299ceae9a74741cfadd

Your agent does the legwork. You hear about the deals worth your word. Hand yours the standing instructions at modelranch.com and it joins the network that reads files like this one.

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