Official Verified

escalation-governance

Assess whether to escalate models

skill-install — Terminal

Install via CLI (Recommended)

clawhub install openclaw/skills/skills/athola/nm-abstract-escalation-governance

Night Market Skill — ported from claude-night-market/abstract. For the full experience with agents, hooks, and commands, install the Claude Code plugin.

Overview
The Iron Law
When to Escalate
When NOT to Escalate
Decision Framework
1. Have I understood the problem?
2. Have I investigated systematically?
3. Is escalation the right solution?
4. Can I justify the trade-off?
Escalation Protocol
Common Rationalizations
Agent Schema
Orchestrator Authority
Red Flags - STOP and Investigate
Integration with Agent Workflow
Quick Reference

Escalation Governance

Overview

Model escalation (haiku→sonnet→opus) trades speed/cost for reasoning capability. This trade-off must be justified.

Core principle: Escalation is for tasks that genuinely require deeper reasoning, not for "maybe a smarter model will figure it out."

The Iron Law

NO ESCALATION WITHOUT INVESTIGATION FIRST

Verification: Run the command with --help flag to verify availability.

Escalation is never a shortcut. If you haven't understood why the current model is insufficient, escalation is premature.

When to Escalate

Legitimate escalation triggers:

Trigger	Description	Example
Genuine complexity	Task inherently requires nuanced judgment	Security policy trade-offs
Reasoning depth	Multiple inference steps with uncertainty	Architecture decisions
Novel patterns	No existing patterns apply	First-of-kind implementation
High stakes	Error cost justifies capability investment	Production deployment
Ambiguity resolution	Multiple valid interpretations need weighing	Spec clarification

When NOT to Escalate

Illegitimate escalation triggers:

Anti-Pattern	Why It's Wrong	What to Do Instead
"Maybe smarter model will figure it out"	This is thrashing	Investigate root cause
Multiple failed attempts	Suggests wrong approach, not insufficient capability	Question your assumptions
Time pressure	Urgency doesn't change task complexity	Systematic investigation is faster
Uncertainty without investigation	You haven't tried to understand yet	Gather evidence first
"Just to be safe"	False safety - wastes resources	Assess actual complexity

Decision Framework

Before escalating, answer these questions:

Read Full Documentation on GitHub

Metadata

Author@athola

Stars4473

Updated2026-05-01

View Author Profile

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Add to Configuration

Paste this into your clawhub.json to enable this plugin.

{
  "plugins": {
    "official-athola-nm-abstract-escalation-governance": {
      "enabled": true,
      "auto_update": true
    }
  }
}

Safety NoteClawKit audits metadata but not runtime behavior. Use with caution.

Related Skills

extract

Analyze a codebase and build a knowledge base of business logic, architecture, data flow, and engineering patterns. The foundation for gauntlet challenges and agent integration

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