Deterministic Tool Adoption Gates: Score It, Don't Vibe It

Originally published on hexisteme notes . A new public repo showed up on 2026-07-14: mattpocock/skills , an MIT-licensed collection of Claude Code agent skills. It's the kind of thing that's easy to fall for in the first ten minutes — skim the READMEs, install the ones that sound useful, move on. I didn't do that. I ran it through the five deterministic gates in my adoption CLI, the same gates every Swift package and npm dependency in my stack has had to clear, extended for the first time to cover a Claude skill. The reason I bother with this at all: adoption decisions rot when they're vibes. "This looks solid" is not a claim you can revisit in six months and check whether you were right about. A score is. So is a pre-registered condition for when you'd bail on it. The rest of this post is what that machinery produced on a real decision, not a hypothetical one. Five gates, one score The CLI scores any candidate — package, library, or now, skill — on five gates: maturity (how long has this actually existed), dependency footprint (what does adopting it drag in), platform fit (native or third-party, and documented or not), policy and developer experience (documentation quality plus release stability), and trajectory (is it actively maintained right now). Each gate contributes points toward a 100-point total, and fixed thresholds turn that total into a verdict: ADOPT at 80 or above, TRIAL at 60 or above, HOLD at 40 or above, reject below that. No gate is a gut check — every one resolves to a number from a query I can rerun. Here's what mattpocock/skills scored, evaluated as of 2026-07-14: Gate Score Why G1 Maturity 4/20 First release 2026-06-17 — 27 days old at evaluation time. The repo itself was only created 2026-02-03, so the project as a whole is five months old. G2 Dependency footprint 20/20 Zero runtime dependencies. Skills are markdown prompt files — structurally, there's nothing to depend on. G3 Platform fit 10/20 Third-party, not built into the platform, but do