Show HN: Stepgate – AI agents that can't skip steps, in one portable file
Write an agent's procedure once, as a YAML stepfile, and every step is gated: the agent moves on only when a mechanical check passes, never on its own word. A stepfile has no packages, no versions to pin and no code to deploy, so it moves as a single file to any MCP client, such as Claude Code, Cursor or an agent you wrote, and runs on the model that client already uses. A stepfile declares its inputs, the remote APIs and MCP servers it may call, and an ordered list of steps.
- ▪Write an agent's procedure once, as a YAML stepfile, and every step is gated: the agent moves on only when a mechanical check passes, never on its own word.
- ▪A stepfile has no packages, no versions to pin and no code to deploy, so it moves as a single file to any MCP client, such as Claude Code, Cursor or an agent you wrote, and runs on the model that client already uses.
- ▪A stepfile declares its inputs, the remote APIs and MCP servers it may call, and an ordered list of steps.
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| Original publisher | GitHub |
| Canonical URL | https://github.com/Chaarangan/stepgate |
| Publication time | Mon, 28 Sep 2026 00:57:31 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-09-28T02:46:09.285Z |
| Last seen | 2026-09-28T02:46:09.285Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | NKWXI-CbYMhe · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
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WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Stepgate Agents can't skip steps. Write an agent's procedure once, as a YAML stepfile, and every step is gated: the agent moves on only when a mechanical check passes, never on its own word. One file runs anywhere. A stepfile has no packages, no versions to pin and no code to deploy, so it moves as a single file to any MCP client, such as Claude Code, Cursor or an agent you wrote, and runs on the model that client already uses. A stepfile declares its inputs, the remote APIs and MCP servers it may call, and an ordered list of steps. Each step says what output it must produce and which gates check that output. The file names no model and no framework. Stepgate runs stepfiles. It is an MCP server that offers each stepfile as a tool.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at GitHub.