principle-bounded-loops

principle-bounded-loops is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from bostonaholic/team. It costs 28 tokens per session (206 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A set of rules for making loops, retries, and watch cycles stop at a declared limit or clear final condition. It requires the unresolved state to be reported when that limit is reached.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when designing polling, retry logic, monitoring jobs, review cycles, or other repeated work.
Why use it?
It prevents automation from running forever or silently repeating work when it cannot reach a result.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Written for Claude Code and Codex: user-invocable in frontmatter, but also agents/openai.yaml present.

Part of the team plugin — 92 skills, 13 agents, 2 hooks shipped together

Good fit Use it when designing polling, retry logic, monitoring jobs, review cycles, or other repeated work.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/bostonaholic/team/principle-bounded-loops
Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

Any agent
npx skills add bostonaholic/team --skill principle-bounded-loops
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/bostonaholic/team

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Or install team, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 92 skills, 13 agents, 2 hooks.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for principle-bounded-loops

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/bostonaholic/team/principle-bounded-loops/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/bostonaholic/team/principle-bounded-loops)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/bostonaholic/team/principle-bounded-loops"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/bostonaholic/team/principle-bounded-loops/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

agentmods 80×15 button for principle-bounded-loops

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/bostonaholic/team/principle-bounded-loops"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/bostonaholic/team/principle-bounded-loops.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 28 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 206 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00028 $0.00206
Opus 5 $0.00014 $0.00103
Sonnet 5 $0.00006 $0.00041
Haiku 4.5 $0.00003 $0.00021

Measured 4d ago against content hash fc6ecc96ff92, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-09, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

principle-bounded-loops scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 4d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

skills/principle-bounded-loops/SKILL.md · 17 lines

What it actually says

Bounded Loops

Declare the bound with the loop: watch cycles, retries, poll budgets, helpers in flight, or a terminal verdict.

  • Halt loudly at a count cap and report all unresolved state; never restart, extend, or soften exit criteria.
  • Keep retry budgets small and stated: "retry once, then halt loudly".
  • Treat a verdict as the bound; declare it and never supply a count the loop deliberately omits. The operator is the outer bound.
  • Preserve Team's uncapped review verdicts: DESIGN ends on the reviewer's verdict; IMPLEMENT ends when no Blocking or Major finding remains.
  • Give outputs explicit budgets: ~200-line design, ≤ 30-line helper reply, byte-capped prompt.
  • Restructure over-budget output by dropping whole named units. Never silent truncation.
Files

What ships with it

1 file beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 4d ago Changed · -20 lines · -21 tokens per session fc6ecc96ff92
  2. 6d ago First seen · 37 lines · 49 tokens per session scan A a092b905e28d

Subscribe to this mod's changes

principle-bounded-loops is a skill published in the GitHub repository bostonaholic/team (11 stars, last pushed today), licensed MIT. It adds 28 tokens to every session and 206 once invoked, about $0.0001 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-09-03.