🛡️ Governance & Lockdown

In a professional development environment, ensuring that your AI agent is operating with the correct set of specialized skills—and only those skills—is critical for security, performance, and reproducibility.

Skill Harbor provides a robust governance system that allows you to isolate your agent's context using Lockdown Mode, Stowage, and Unstowing.

⚓ The Governance Lifecycle

graph LR
    Local[Project Manifest] --> Lockdown[skill-harbor up --lockdown]
    Lockdown --> Stow[Stow Existing Skills]
    Stow --> Berth[Berth Manifest Skills]
    Berth --> Unstow[skill-harbor unstow]
    Unstow --> Restore[Original Environment]

🔒 Lockdown Mode (--lockdown)

When you run skill-harbor up --lockdown, Harbor treats your harbor-manifest.json as the exclusive source of truth. Any existing skills in your agent's configuration folders that are not defined in the manifest are moved into a secure backup location (Stowage).

Why use Lockdown?

• Client Confidentiality: Switching from a personal project to a client project with strict rules.
• Reproducibility: Ensuring every developer on a team has the exact same context for a specific task.
• Security: Preventing agents from accidentally using unvetted or "ghost" skills in a sensitive repository.

# Sync and enforce a manifest-only environment
skill-harbor up --lockdown

📦 Stowage & Unstowing

If you need a clean slate for a limited time but don't want to permanently delete your existing skills, you can use the stow and unstow commands.

skill-harbor stow

Moves all current skills in your agent's directory into the Skill Harbor metadata folder (.harbor/stowage). This effectively "clears the deck" for a fresh session.

skill-harbor unstow

The "Unlock" command. It restores your previously stowed skills, merging them back into your agent's active configuration. This is typically run after you've finished a lockdown session.

# Manually back up current skills
skill-harbor stow

# Restore stowed skills
skill-harbor unstow

⚓ Why Use Governance?

1. Consistency: One developer adding a 10,000-token skill can ruin the token economy for the whole team. Lockdown prevents this.
2. Context Hygiene: Agents perform better when their context is "right-sized." Governance helps you keep the "displacement" (token usage) low.
3. Auditability: By using a declarative manifest and --lockdown, you can audit exactly what logic was available to an agent during any specific development phase.
4. Quality & Governance: The broader public skill ecosystem currently suffers from low average quality (6.2/12 in the SkillsBench scoring). Skill Harbor's provenance and governance tracking is critical for enterprise deployment to ensure agents only utilize vetted, verified skills.

# Combining global and local governance
skill-harbor up --global --lockdown

Reference: Li, X., et al. (2026). SkillsBench: Benchmarking How Well Agent Skills Work Across Diverse Tasks. https://www.skillsbench.ai/skillsbench.pdf

For the broader product comparison, see How does Skill Harbor align with SkillsBench?.