Why variant, break, and explain-interface Skills Are Disabled for Model Invocation

The variant, break, and explain-interface skills carry disable-model-invocation: true in their front-matter and policy.allow_implicit_invocation: false in their agents/openai.yaml configuration to ensure only human users—not automated models—can trigger these exploratory workflows.

The jakubkrehel/skills repository maintains a strict architectural boundary between user-invoked and model-invoked capabilities. While many skills operate autonomously within AI-driven pipelines, these three specific skills are intentionally gated to prevent automatic execution of operations that generate experimental artifacts or require explicit human judgment.

The Dual-Flag Policy in AGENTS.md

According to AGENTS.md at line 47, the repository implements a synchronized locking mechanism using two complementary flags across different AI harnesses:

"interface-review, variant, break and explain-interface are the user-invoked skills. Each carries disable-model-invocation: true in its front-matter and policy.allow_implicit_invocation: false in its agents/openai.yaml. Those are the Claude Code and Codex halves of the same switch, and must be set together, or the skill behaves differently per harness."

This dual-configuration ensures consistent behavior across both the Claude Code and Codex execution environments. The disable-model-invocation flag controls the Claude Code harness, while policy.allow_implicit_invocation governs the Codex side—together they create an exclusive user-invocation gate that is enforced regardless of which AI system processes the request.

Architectural Rationale for Disabling Model Invocation

Preventing Unwanted Exploratory Artifacts

The variant, break, and explain-interface skills generate exploratory or experimental outputs: design variants, robustness harnesses, or UI explanations. If models could invoke these automatically, they would spawn unwanted pages, temporary files, or noisy output without human supervision. Disabling model invocation ensures a human decides when these potentially voluminous artifacts are actually needed.

Preserving the Orchestrator Hand-Off

The repository uses better-interface as a top-level orchestrator that aggregates findings from domain-specific skills and delivers a final verdict. If lower-level skills like variant or break could be invoked directly by models, they might bypass this orchestration layer, breaking the intended review pipeline. Restricting invocation to manual CLI commands forces all exploratory work to flow through the proper orchestration hierarchy.

Maintaining Cross-Harness Policy Consistency

The jakubkrehel/skills repository supports multiple AI harnesses (Claude Code and Codex). Setting both disable-model-invocation: true in the skill's front-matter and policy.allow_implicit_invocation: false in agents/openai.yaml guarantees that the skill behaves identically across environments. Setting only one flag would create inconsistent behavior where a skill might be blocked in Claude Code but available to Codex, or vice versa.

Avoiding Automatic Side Effects

These skills perform operations with side effects: writing temporary files, opening browser windows, or generating network traffic. Model-initiated runs could trigger these actions without explicit user consent, creating unpredictable system states. The restriction ensures that side-effect-heavy operations occur only after deliberate human initiation.

Technical Implementation Details

Each restricted skill implements the policy through specific configuration files:

• skills/variant/agents/openai.yaml – Sets disable-model-invocation: true
• skills/break/agents/openai.yaml – Sets disable-model-invocation: true
• skills/explain-interface/agents/openai.yaml – Sets disable-model-invocation: true

Additionally, each contains the Codex-side restriction: policy.allow_implicit_invocation: false.

The central policy documentation in AGENTS.md explicitly lists these skills alongside interface-review as the exclusive user-invoked set, distinguishing them from the model-invoked skills that operate automatically within the pipeline.

Manual Invocation Examples

Because these skills are excluded from model invocation, users must trigger them explicitly via CLI:

# Generate design variants (user-invoked only)

npx skills add jakubkrehel/skills
skills variant --count 5 --output ./variants

# Create robustness break tests (user-invoked only)

skills break --scenario network-failure --output ./break-tests

# Explain a UI interface (user-invoked only)

skills explain-interface https://example.com/login

Attempts to invoke these skills programmatically from other skills or automated pipelines will fail, ensuring the human-in-the-loop requirement is enforced at the configuration level.

Summary

• variant, break, and explain-interface are exclusively user-invoked skills that cannot be triggered by AI models.
• The restriction relies on two synchronized flags: disable-model-invocation: true (Claude Code) and policy.allow_implicit_invocation: false (Codex).
• These skills generate experimental artifacts that would create noise if executed automatically.
• The restriction preserves the better-interface orchestrator's role as the central aggregation point.
• All three skills require manual CLI invocation to execute their side-effect-heavy operations.

Frequently Asked Questions

What happens if only one of the two restriction flags is set?

If a developer sets disable-model-invocation: true but forgets policy.allow_implicit_invocation: false in agents/openai.yaml, the skill will behave inconsistently across harnesses. Claude Code will block model invocation while Codex might still allow it, creating unpredictable behavior depending on which AI system processes the request.

Can models indirectly trigger these skills through the better-interface orchestrator?

No. The better-interface orchestrator aggregates findings from other skills but does not invoke variant, break, or explain-interface automatically. These skills must be triggered manually via CLI commands, ensuring the orchestrator's output remains focused on synthesis rather than initiating exploratory side-workflows.

Are there other skills in the repository with these restrictions?

Yes. According to AGENTS.md, interface-review shares the same restriction flags as variant, break, and explain-interface. These four skills constitute the complete set of user-invoked skills in the jakubkrehel/skills repository, while all other skills are available for model-driven invocation.

Why are temporary file operations considered risky enough to require manual invocation?

Skills like break and variant write files to specified output directories and may open browsers or initiate network requests. In automated pipelines, these side effects could clutter file systems, overwrite existing work, or trigger external services without oversight. Restricting them to manual invocation ensures users explicitly specify output locations and consent to the operations.

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "instagit": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "instagit@latest"]
    }
  }
}