Compliance
Verify an Agent Skill's Source, Version, and License
A provenance and license review that identifies source, author, version, integrity, permitted use, and distribution obligations before an agent skill enters a repository or runtime.
The process
Work it in this order.
- Identify the exact source URL or repository, revision, tag, retrieval date, author or organization, and the proposed use, modification, and distribution context.
- Inspect license files, SPDX metadata, notices, bundled assets, scripts, templates, and dependencies, recording exact identifiers and any conflicting declarations.
- Map license permissions and conditions to the intended use, checking attribution, notices, copyleft, noncommercial, field-of-use, and redistribution obligations.
- Verify version continuity, signatures or checksums when available, repository history, maintainer identity, and whether fetched content matches the reviewed revision.
- Document approved, rejected, or conditional use, required notices, obligations, reviewer, and unresolved legal or provenance questions without giving legal advice.
- Retain the evidence package, set a re-review trigger for source or license changes, and prevent unapproved skills from entering a shared runtime.
- Return the provenance and license decision, obligations, evidence, open questions, and unresolved risks, and pause before accepting terms, publishing, or distributing.
Bring this
Inputs the cat will ask for.
- skill source and exact revision
- intended use and distribution context
- bundled files and dependency inventory
- review policy and qualified owner
Router + one playbook
Route first. Choose one.
Cat Paw loads one playbook per task rather than merging several. Start with this router; the remaining paths are workflow-specific candidates it can inspect.
- Router:
agent-skill-catalog-pack skills/agent-skill-catalog-pack/agent-skill-provenance-license-review/SKILL.md
Guardrails
The boundaries travel with the prompt.
- Verify the actual tools, accounts, permissions, and workspace before starting; never claim an unavailable tool, account, source, or capability.
- Use Latch/target-workspace for private code, artifacts, live probes, or non-public data; if that access is unavailable, stop at the boundary and report the blocker rather than substituting a guess.
- Pause for explicit approval before consequential external actions; return evidence and unresolved risks, assumptions, and any action still awaiting approval.
Done means
A checkable finish.
A provenance and license review ties the exact skill revision to source evidence, license terms, obligations, approval status, re-review triggers, and unresolved risks.
Sources
Where this process came from.
- github.com/sickn33/agentic-awesome-skills/tree/7b534bc15d833baf3bc98b3ca4fb23eda48342bb/
- docs.github.com/en/repositories/managing-your-repositorys-settings-and-features/customizing-your-repository/licensing-a-repository
- spdx.org/licenses/
Sources establish the workflow pattern. Reddit and community posts, where present, are treated as practitioner anecdotes rather than universal facts.