Set guardrails

Guardrails are quality gates — tests, linters, security checks — that every worker agent must pass before it creates a PR. Without guardrails, agents can’t start working. The Guardrails command walks you through defining them as YAML files in .cate/guardrails/, committed to your repo so every agent follows the same rules.

Run the command

Click New Task in the top right, then Configure → Guardrails. The agent detects your project’s stack and walks you through each category:

1. Testing (required) — at least one testing gate must be defined. The agent detects your test runner (Jest, pytest, JUnit, cargo test, etc.) and asks about coverage thresholds.

2. Formatting and linting — Prettier, Black, rustfmt, Spotless, ESLint, clippy — whatever fits your stack.

3. Security — dependency vulnerability scanning and static analysis.

4. Build verification — a full build command to catch compilation or bundling failures.

5. Custom gates — conformance tests, performance benchmarks, integration suites, or anything else that can be expressed as a shell command with a zero exit code for pass.

For each category, the agent recommends tools based on your stack and asks whether you want them. You can accept, skip, or customize the commands.

What it creates

Each category gets a YAML file in .cate/guardrails/:

.cate/guardrails/testing.yml

name: testing
required: true
description: "All tests must pass before creating a PR"

gates:
    - name: "unit-tests"
      command: "npm test"
      pass-condition: "exit-code-zero"
      description: "Run unit and integration tests"
      run: "before-pr"

Set required: true to block PRs on failure, or required: false to report results without blocking.

After writing the files, the agent offers to commit and push (or commit, push, and merge to your default branch).

Re-running

Run the Guardrails command again at any time to add, change, or remove gates. The agent reads your existing guardrails and presents the current state before asking what to modify.

Reference

See the Guardrails reference for the full YAML schema, field descriptions, and examples for Java, Python, Rust, and other stacks.