Forge's gates and rails are default-strong but toggleable. The gates skill is how you flip one off (or back on), record a human-gate approval, and see enforcement state. The stored truth is one field — workflow.gates.<id>.enabled — and the installed hooks read the resolved config at run time, so a disabled rail is genuinely inert, not cosmetically off.

Toggling gates and rails

When to use

• "Disable the gate", "turn off TDD enforcement", "the tdd intent rail is blocking me".
• "Toggle / enable a gate", "loosen enforcement for this repo".
• "Approve a human gate" (record a durable approval event on an issue).

Toggle a gate or rail (the enforcement switch)

forge gate disable <gate-id>     # set workflow.gates.<id>.enabled = false in .forge/config.yaml
forge gate enable  <gate-id>     # set it back to true

An unknown gate id — or disabling a locked gate — errors before anything is written, never mid-run. Because the hooks resolve config at run time, the flip takes effect immediately with no reinstall.