human-only. Start this only when a human asks for it by name. Granting yourself naming authority is exactly the thing this skill is careful about — if you arrived here from another skill, stop.
The human is stepping away, and work that needs a gated name would otherwise stop at the proposal and wait. This lends you their answer so the work continues: you pick the name you would have proposed, mark it, and carry it through to a PR where a human settles it before the merge.
The loan buys motion, never a decision. A name used under it is still open.
How a loan is held — the markers, the grep, the PR table, the reviewer note, the merge gate, and the settle-up — is the borrowed-authority ledger, shared with grant-decision-authority. Read it; this skill only says what may be borrowed.
1. Find the repo's naming authority
Before the ledger's grep, before anything. The repo — not this skill — decides which names are even gated, what an acceptable proposal contains, and where an approval gets recorded. It is usually stated inline in AGENTS.md or CLAUDE.md with a pointer to a fuller page (docs/, an ADR). Read the pointer target too: the inline block is the summary, and the exemptions live in the page.
Where the repo has no naming authority, there is nothing to borrow. Say so and stop — an unbounded grant over every identifier in the tree is not what the human just handed you.
Then run the ledger's grep -rn "TEMPORARY AGENT" .: hits mean a previous window left loans standing, so settle those first.
Report what authority you found and that the window is open, then get on with the work.
Done when: you can name the repo's naming authority, say which names it gates, and the tree is either clean of markers or you have settled the ones you found.
2. What may be borrowed
Gated names, and nothing else. This grant does not reach scope, spec deviations, dependencies, or anything else a decision could be about — that is grant-decision-authority, and it is a separate act by the human.
Two limits on what a naming loan covers:
- Gate generously. A name you are unsure about is borrowed and marked. An unnecessary marker costs one question at settle-up; a missing one costs a rename after review.
- Adoption is not a loan. A name taken from a named upstream — another repo, the framework, a wire schema, a third-party API — needs no approval where the repo's authority says so. Cite the source in place, as that authority requires, and leave the marker off. Borrowing a name you should have adopted is how a wire contract quietly stops matching.
3. Borrowing a name
When the work reaches a gated name, do the whole proposal anyway — the repo's authority defines its shape, and it is typically the full set, a real alternative, and why. The proposal is the thing the human answers; skipping it turns the settle-up into a fresh naming session instead of a review, and leaves the PR table with a row it cannot fill.
Then pick the name you would have proposed, write the marker at its sites per the ledger, and continue.
Done when: every gated name in the work is either adopted with its source cited, or borrowed with a marker carrying the name, the alternative, and the reason.
4. PR, gate, settle
All three are the ledger's: generate the table from the grep, carry the reviewer note, open the PR normally, and settle one case at a time when the human answers. Record each approval per the approval-policy skill.
Done when: the ledger's own done-when is met — no markers, every row answered, the removal pushed.
Where this sits in the flow
/implement builds the ticket; this skill is what lets it keep building past a name it cannot approve. /create-pr-for-branch opens the PR the table lands in, /review-pr-in-worktree judges it — its reviewers are the ones the note is written for — and /respond-to-pr-review is usually where the human's answers arrive and the markers come out.
/grant-decision-authority is the wider grant, of which this is the narrow, most common case. /implement-unattended turns on both at once, plus parallel build.