protected-commit

A guide for handling edits to protected project files, such as workflow configuration, lockfiles, agent instructions, and generated harness files. These files require a one-time authorization tied to the exact change.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it after a protected-state commit refusal or before editing one of the listed protected files.
Why use it?
It explains why a commit was refused and identifies the approved process for changing protected files instead of bypassing the safety check.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

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.

agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/harshanandak/forge/protected-commit
Any agent
npx skills add harshanandak/forge --skill protected-commit
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/harshanandak/forge

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 82 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 991 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
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 $0.00082 $0.00991
Opus 5 $0.00041 $0.00495
Sonnet 5 $0.00016 $0.00198
Haiku 4.5 $0.00008 $0.00099

Measured yesterday against content hash d8ed668a8250, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

protected-commit 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 yesterday.

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.

.forge/contributor-skills/protected-commit/SKILL.md · 82 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 82 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

protected-commit

The gate is content-bound and fails closed. Read what it told you, then use the owning command — or stop and say the path is currently unreachable.

What the gate actually is

scripts/protected-state-check.js runs on every pre-commit (lefthook job protected-state, no glob, so it sees every commit). For each staged file it calls assertProtectedWriteAllowed, and any file that matches a protected surface needs a one-time, content-bound Kernel capability issued for the exact actor, worktree, surface, path, bytes, and source HEAD. [verified 2026-08-13 — lib/protected-state-authority.js]

Ask the code which surface a path is on rather than guessing:

node -e "console.log(require('./lib/protected-state-surfaces').assertProtectedWriteAllowed('AGENTS.md'))"

Three things that are commonly believed and are wrong

  1. FORGE_PROTECTED_STATE_ALLOWED_SURFACES does not authorize anything. No runtime code path reads it. It appears only in prose docs and one test fixture. docs/reference/protected-state-surfaces.md says so itself at the "Surface-only environment declarations do not authorize protected changes" line, and then contradicts itself further down — the contradiction is a documentation bug, not a hidden door. [verified 2026-08-13]

  2. The categories: block in .forge/protected-paths.yaml is not what runs. Runtime enforcement uses a hardcoded PROTECTED_SURFACES list in lib/protected-state-surfaces.js. The manifest's W1 categories (forge_core, user_protocol, generated_artifacts) are documentation. So lib/**, scripts/**, and skills/** — listed under forge_core in the manifest — are not blocked at runtime today, while AGENTS.md is, under the legacy surface id generated_harness. [verified 2026-08-13]

  3. --no-verify is not the answer. Bypassing hooks is forbidden for agents in this repo, and a hook you route around protects nobody. If the gate is wrong, the gate gets fixed in its own PR. [Forge #9 ×3]

Read the full file on GitHub · 82 lines

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. yesterday First seen · 82 lines · 82 tokens per session scan A d8ed668a8250

Subscribe to this mod's changes

protected-commit is a skill published in the GitHub repository harshanandak/forge (4 stars, last pushed 2d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 82 tokens to every session and 991 once invoked, about $0.0004 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 2026-08-31.

Related

Other skills, from other repositories

systematic-debugging

Use when encountering any bug, test failure, or unexpected behavior, before proposing fixes.

obra/superpowers · 21 tokens

next-cache-components-adoption

Turn on Cache Components in a Next.js app and resolve the blocking routes it surfaces. Use when the user wants to enable, adopt, or migrate to Cache Components, flip the cacheComponents flag, work through a flood of blocking-prerender / instant validation errors, run the cache-components-instant-false codemod, or…

vercel/next.js · 95 tokens

babysit-pr

Babysit a GitHub pull request after creation by continuously polling review comments, CI checks/workflow runs, and mergeability state until the PR is merged/closed or user help is required. Diagnose failures, retry likely flaky failures up to 3 times, auto-fix/push branch-related issues when appropriate, and keep…

openai/codex · 114 tokens

imagegen

Generate or edit raster images when the task benefits from AI-created bitmap visuals such as photos, illustrations, textures, sprites, mockups, or transparent-background cutouts. Use when Codex should create a brand-new image, transform an existing image, or derive visual variants from references, and the output…

openai/codex · 113 tokens

cpu-profile-analysis

Analyze V8/Chrome CPU profiles (.cpuprofile) and DevTools trace files (Trace-.json). Use when: profiling performance, investigating slow functions, comparing code paths, finding bottlenecks, analyzing timeToRequest, understanding call trees from sampling profiler data, analyzing layout/paint/rendering, investigating…

microsoft/vscode · 71 tokens

next-cache-components-optimizer

Drive a Next.js route to instant navigation by setting up an agentic loop, under Cache Components / PPR, on initial load (hard navigation) and client-side navigation (soft navigation). Encode the goal as a failing @next/playwright instant() e2e and work it to green, one verified route at a time; the shipped test then…

vercel/next.js · 170 tokens