A control plane is only useful if the decision survives contact with the developer’s machine. Policate packages the company’s approved models, tools, instructions, skills, and hooks into a signed managed bundle. The binary checks it at startup, reports drift, and applies enforced changes before an agent session starts.
Dashboard state becomes local runtime state
decision pathMCP servers and tools
Platform owners can approve a small set of MCP servers and tool capabilities without distributing a new binary. The local tool registry reports what is installed, what is allowed, and which policy revision made the decision. Tool calls are visible in the same request and audit surfaces as inference.
- Approve the server centrally
- Ship the connection and instructions at startup
- Block unapproved tool calls before execution
- Keep a trace of actor, tool, arguments, and outcome
$ policate tools statusSkills, instructions, and hooks
Skills and instructions shape how the agent works; hooks protect the repository boundary. The important distinction is ownership: developers can see the managed block and its version, while the company can revise or revoke it without waiting for everyone to reinstall.
The pre-commit path stays fast and local. Deeper type checks, tests, and policy reviews can run at pre-push. A managed hook preserves user-authored content and removes only the Policate-owned block when it becomes stale.
- Instructions: context and operating rules
- Skills: reusable workflows and commands
- MCP: approved external capabilities
- Hooks: staged-diff and pre-push quality gates
$ policate hooks review --staged