Tool Gating

Tool Gating is governance applied at the Tool boundary. A Tool's gating expresses the Variables that must be present, the Policies that must hold, the prior Routine steps that must have completed, and the authorisation or identity conditions that must be satisfied. Gating is authored, not inferred. For Consequential Tools, gating typically carries High-criticality Policies under Deterministic Enforcement: the gating layer enforces the conditions before the Tool is invoked. Tool Gating is the place where authored governance prevents unauthorised side effects. Every gating evaluation, success and failure, is recorded in the production trace.