Concepts

Your agent skipped the tests. Or it deployed before CI went green, or approved its own PR, or just ignored the rule you wrote three times in the system prompt. Flowgate fixes that without another paragraph of pleading: it runs your coding agent — Claude Code, Cursor — as a state machine, where each move (transition) takes the workspace from one state to the next, and only the legal moves are ever offered. The move you don't want isn't blocked; in the current state it simply doesn't exist.

Most people meet Flowgate as the gateway that turns fifty MCP tools into two. That's the doorway, not the building. The ladder below builds up the cure one idea at a time — ending in a runner that owns the control flow instead of the model. Each page reads on its own. Start anywhere, or climb from the top.

1 The MCP gateway Two fixed tools front all the scripts, tests, and deploy steps your agent can run. The doorway. 2 Links, not lists The model follows the legal moves you allow — not a menu of tools. 3 Building blocks, approved once Your agent composes approved scripts, skills, and calls. It never gets a shell. 4 Skip what doesn't need a brain Auto-run computable steps; wake the model only at real decisions. 5 Guards & evidence Policy is data — permission, role, expression, proof — not per-tool glue code. 6 Audit & replay Every move the model made, on the record and replayable. 7 Agents that don't stomp each other Advanced Run a swarm of agents and keep your workspace intact. 8 One shared vocabulary Advanced A lexicon so the model, your workflows, and your team mean the same thing by the same word. 9 Compose & model-per-step at scale Advanced Define a capability once, govern it everywhere, and pay only for the model each step needs. 10 Harness first. Models second. Advanced The inversion, named: a deterministic harness for nondeterministic intelligence.