One rule, installed: the judgment stays human.
The Approval Gate is a single skill you paste into any agent's standing instructions: Claude, ChatGPT, Copilot, or anything MCP-connected. It installs one behavior. The agent does the labor, and the fields that represent human judgment stay empty until a person fills them.
One markdown file. An email address is the whole cost.
Small enough to paste. Strict enough to matter.
State the boundary
At session start the agent names the workflow and the fields it will not set. The contract goes on the record before the work does.
Leave human fields empty
Marked "awaiting human." An empty cell waiting for a person is the system working, not a gap to close.
Suggest in the notes
The agent's proposal goes in a labeled note with its reasoning. The distance between suggestion and field is the review.
Dictate, don't delegate
A human may state a value and have the agent enter it, as scribe, on the record. Asked to decide for itself, the agent declines once, and any override is stamped loud in the artifact.
Carry provenance
Every artifact records what was read, what was suggested, and who decided. Appended, never rewritten.
Fair questions.
What's the catch?
An email address. You'll get the file with your receipt, and occasionally a note when a new system ships. That's the whole arrangement.
Will this stop a determined bypass?
No, and it says so honestly. Instructions are a contract, not a lock. The design makes every departure loud and recorded instead of quiet. Structural enforcement lives in our full systems, where approval fields belong to the schema.
What's in the paid version?
Governed Content Skills ($99) expands this gate into complete operating procedures for content audits, briefs, and editorial pipelines: rubrics with exact scale points, two twelve-item checklists, field-by-field permission maps, provenance formats, and adapters for five platforms. This file is its spine.
Can I share it?
Yes. Free to use and share unmodified, attribution intact. Put it in your team's onboarding doc. That's what it's for.
Install it before the next drift.
Paste it into one agent today. The first time you watch a decision cell sit empty, waiting for you, on purpose, you'll know exactly what the full systems are for.