Gating By Blind Restoration

Gating by Blind Restoration

Purpose

Check that an abstraction layer carries enough recoverable structure by testing reconstruction under a strict information firewall — not by self-review. The gate's authority comes from two things: the grader never saw the source, and the author never grades their own work.

When to Use

• After generating or extracting a spec, design doc, schema, API contract, or refactor plan.
• Whenever you need to answer "is this artifact enough to rebuild the next layer from?"
• Whenever the author of an artifact would otherwise judge their own work.

When Not to Use

• Subjective quality (taste, "is it fun / elegant / well-written"). A firewall cannot decide

that, and a confident-sounding grader will rubber-stamp it. Do not gate it.

• When the original source is the intended input anyway, so no abstraction is being trusted.

Required Inputs

• The single artifact text under test.
• A definition of the adjacent layer to reconstruct (e.g. "an implementable structure",

"a reproduction spec hypothesis", "the upstream requirements").

Procedure

1. Pick the gate direction:

• Restoration — can the adjacent layer be recovered from this artifact alone?
• Degeneration — does this generated artifact avoid a dominant exploit / collapse

that a blind reconstructor would immediately find?

1. Spawn an independent sub-agent, run by the orchestrator — never by the artifact's

author, who has already seen the source and cannot judge blind. A freshly spawned grader that sees only the artifact text is a real, independent gate; its verdict is a true gate verdict — do not downgrade it to "self-audit." The degraded path applies only when no separate grader can be spawned at all and you must judge from the same context that produced or read the source: in that case fall back to an explicit self-audit and label the result as self-audit, not a gate verdict.

1. Enforce the input firewall: pass ONLY the artifact text. Do NOT pass the source, the

sibling artifact, runtime traces, observations, screenshots, or repository paths. A single leak makes the verdict worthless.

1. Task it to reconstruct the adjacent layer and report: recovered structure, ambiguities,

likely matches, and likely mismatches versus the (unseen) original.

1. Return a verdict:

• pass — sufficient for the target restoration level.
• weak-pass — core structure recoverable, exact details expected-missing.
• fail — not enough recoverable structure; the artifact must be revised.

To wire gates into a multi-round generation/extraction pipeline (one-shot vs. find→fix→re-check, round caps, abandonment classification), load references/gate-loop-modes.md. For a single standalone check, steps 1–5 are enough.

Validation

The gate worked if the verdict is backed by concrete recovered/missing structure, not "looks fine": a fail must name a specific unrecoverable element or a specific dominant exploit; a pass must point at the structure it actually recovered.

Common Failure Modes

• Firewall leak — source or sibling artifact slips into the gate input; the verdict no

longer measures the artifact.

• Self-grading — the author runs the gate; bias toward pass.
• Gating taste — trying to firewall-test subjective quality instead of recoverability.
• Verdict without evidence — a bare pass/fail with no recovered/missing structure named.

Output

A verdict (pass / weak-pass / fail) plus a short report: recovered structure, ambiguities, likely matches, and likely mismatches.

Source & license

This open-source skill is cataloged on AgentStack and links to its original source — we do not rehost the code.

• Author: abagames
• Source: abagames/agentic-gamedev-skills
• License: MIT

Install and usage instructions live in the source repository linked above.