escalation-governance

escalation-governance is a skill for Claude Code from athola/claude-night-market. It costs 19 tokens per session (2,928 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A guide for deciding whether a task needs a more capable AI model. It treats moving from a faster model to a deeper-reasoning model as a trade-off that must be justified.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when deciding whether the current model is insufficient, checking the task's complexity, and documenting the reason for escalation.
Why use it?
It helps avoid unnecessary cost or delay and prevents model escalation from replacing proper investigation of the problem.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin. Also seen: mentions subagents; mentions Claude Code.

Part of the abstract plugin — 16 skills, 17 commands, 5 agents, 4 hooks shipped together

Good fit Use it when deciding whether the current model is insufficient, checking the task's complexity, and documenting the reason for escalation.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/athola/claude-night-market/escalation-governance
Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

Any agent
npx skills add athola/claude-night-market --skill escalation-governance
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/athola/claude-night-market

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install abstract, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 16 skills, 17 commands, 5 agents, 4 hooks.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for escalation-governance

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/athola/claude-night-market/escalation-governance/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/athola/claude-night-market/escalation-governance)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/athola/claude-night-market/escalation-governance"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/athola/claude-night-market/escalation-governance/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

agentmods 80×15 button for escalation-governance

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/athola/claude-night-market/escalation-governance"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/athola/claude-night-market/escalation-governance.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 19 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,928 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe. Third-party audits
  • NVIDIA SkillSpector warn 7 Sept 2026
SkillSpector: 1 finding, up to high

These are SkillSpector’s own severities. On a checked sample its high-severity flags on skills were ~96% false positives — a documented command, a public API, a “never do X” rule — so we show them as a caution to read, not a verdict. Why →

  • high System Prompt Leakage · line 120
    Skill contains instructions that could directly expose system prompts, internal rules, or hidden instructions to users or external parties.
    Fix: Remove any instructions that reveal, print, or output system prompts or internal rules. System instructions should never be exposed to end users.
How audits are shown
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00019 $0.02928
Opus 5 $0.00010 $0.01464
Sonnet 5 $0.00004 $0.00586
Haiku 4.5 $0.00002 $0.00293

Measured 13d ago against content hash ad4591dc2044, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-12, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

escalation-governance scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 13d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

plugins/abstract/skills/escalation-governance/SKILL.md · 285 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 285 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Table of Contents

Escalation Governance

Overview

Model escalation (haiku→sonnet→opus) trades speed/cost for reasoning capability. This trade-off must be justified.

Core principle: Escalation is for tasks that genuinely require deeper reasoning, not for "maybe a smarter model will figure it out."

The Iron Law

NO ESCALATION WITHOUT INVESTIGATION FIRST

Verification: Run the command with --help flag to verify availability.

Escalation is never a shortcut. If you haven't understood why the current model is insufficient, escalation is premature.

When to Escalate

Legitimate escalation triggers:

Trigger Description Example
Genuine complexity Task inherently requires nuanced judgment Security policy trade-offs
Reasoning depth Multiple inference steps with uncertainty Architecture decisions
Novel patterns No existing patterns apply First-of-kind implementation
High stakes Error cost justifies capability investment Production deployment
Ambiguity resolution Multiple valid interpretations need weighing Spec clarification

Read the full file on GitHub · 285 lines

Files

What ships with it

4 files beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 13d ago First seen · 285 lines · 19 tokens per session scan A ad4591dc2044

Subscribe to this mod's changes

escalation-governance is a skill published in the GitHub repository athola/claude-night-market (337 stars, last pushed 2d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 19 tokens to every session and 2,928 once invoked, about $0.0001 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.