Creation Guard: The Pre-Creation Gate
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Creation Guard: The Pre-Creation Gate
The most common failure mode in a growing skill system is duplication. You build a skill for something, forget about it three months later, build another one for the same thing. Now you have two skills that overlap, no clear rule about which to use, and the cognitive overhead of maintaining both.
creation-guard is the antidote. It’s a mandatory pre-creation analysis that runs before any new skill, agent, or CLI tool is written. The process:
- Search all existing skills and agents for functional overlap
- Assess the degree of overlap (0–100%)
- Issue one of five recommendations: PROCEED, EXTEND, COMPOSE, ITERATE, or BLOCK
The output looks like this:
CREATION GUARD ANALYSIS
PROPOSAL:
Type: skill
Name: ai-slop-detector
Purpose: Detect AI writing patterns in drafts
RELATED ARTIFACTS FOUND:
1. writing-quality (skill)
Overlap: 95% — already detects AI patterns, fixes them
RECOMMENDATION: BLOCK
RATIONALE:
writing-quality already covers AI pattern detection with a fixing workflow.
Creating a new skill would duplicate functionality with nothing to set it apart.
Use writing-quality instead.The discipline is in running this check before you build, not after. After is too late — you’ve already invested the time. Before is when it’s cheap to change direction.
In practice: before creating ANY new skill or agent, run creation-guard. It takes two minutes. It’s saved far more than two minutes in avoided duplication.