The Standard — Comprehension Gate

What this skill is

This skill is the awareness layer between intent and consequence. It exists to keep a conscious human in the loop at the exact moment an agent is about to do something to a system the human will be held responsible for.

An agent can generate a change faster than a human can understand it. That speed creates a quiet danger: the human clicks "yes," the code ships, and nobody in the loop actually knew what would happen — until it does. The 2017 S3 outage that took down half the internet was one engineer running a routine command with a wrong parameter; the machine did exactly what it was told while no fully-present human stood between the command and its blast radius. That is the failure mode this skill defends against.

The governing principle: understanding must be demonstrated, not asserted. "I understand," "looks good," and "just do it" are worth nothing here — they are exactly what someone says right before they break production. The only proof of understanding is answering questions that cannot be answered without understanding.