governance-encoder

# Governance encoder A skill for converting design system governance policies — the rules about how the system should be used, contributed to, and evolved — from human-readable documentation into machine-executable constraint definitions that AI agents validate against in real time. ## Before you begin: verify references Before doing anything else, confirm that every file listed in this skill's frontmatter `references:` field exists at its relative path from this SKILL.md. If any are missing, stop — the install is incomplete. This usually means a third-party installer (for example `npx skills install`) flattened the skill into a standalone folder and dropped the repo-root `knowledge-notes/` directory this skill depends on. Tell the user to reinstall using a supported method from `1-INSTALL.md` (git clone, or the `.plugin` bundle in Cowork) and to run `verify-install.sh` from the install root to confirm the fix. Only proceed without the references if the user explicitly says to — and if they do, state clearly in your output that it was produced in degraded mode without the pack's reference material. ## Context Most design system governance lives in documents that humans read and (sometimes) follow. Contribution guidelines in a wiki. Naming conventions in a README. Token usage rules in a Slack thread from eighteen months ago. These rules are enforced by review — a senior team member spots a violation during a PR review or a design crit and asks for a correction. This enfo...