governance-encoder
Governance encoder
A skill for turning the governance rules a team has written down into enforcement that actually runs: linter rules, dependency boundaries, code ownership and CI checks, each traced to the document it came from. Rules with no executable form are written to a short governance page that says who checks them and when, so nothing is presented as automated when it isn't.
Before you begin: verify references
Confirm that every path in this skill's frontmatter references: exists relative to this SKILL.md. If any is missing, stop: the install is incomplete, usually because a flattening installer (for example npx skills install) dropped the repo-root knowledge-notes/ directory. Tell the user to reinstall by a method in 1-INSTALL.md and run verify-install.sh from the install root. Proceed without the references only if the user explicitly says to, and then say in the output that it was produced without the pack's reference material.
Context
Most design system governance lives in documents: contribution guidelines in a wiki, naming conventions in a README, token rules in a Slack thread from a year ago. They are enforced by review, when a senior reviewer happens to notice. That model breaks at scale, and it breaks completely for coding agents, which never read the wiki.
The tools that enforce rules already exist. ESLint has a naming-convention rule. Stylelint can forbid raw values in colour properties. dependency-cruiser can stop an atom importing an organism. CODEOWNERS can require the system team's review on token files. A design system's governance-as-code is not a new rule engine; it is those tools, configured to the team's rules, with each rule pointing back at the sentence that justifies it. This skill writes that configuration. An earlier version wrote JSON rules that nothing executed and called them "enforced automatically"; that is exactly the gap this version closes.
Boundaries
This skill encodes rules that exist. It doesn't decide what the rules should be (decision-record records that), write the CI workflow that runs the linters (cicd-integration), or audit compliance (token-compliance, naming-audit, component-api-validator do that). If the team has no written rules and can't state any, there is nothing to encode; say so and suggest contribution-workflow.