principle-fail-closed

principle-fail-closed is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from bostonaholic/team. It costs 28 tokens per session (167 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A safety rule that treats unknown, missing, or inconclusive results as failures rather than approval.

In plain words
What is it for?
It is for designing validation steps, review gates, security checks, and automated decisions that must stop when their result cannot be trusted.
Why use it?
It prevents uncertain checks from silently allowing unsafe work to continue.

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 It is for designing validation steps, review gates, security checks, and automated decisions that must stop when their result cannot be trusted.

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

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/bostonaholic/team/principle-fail-closed/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/bostonaholic/team/principle-fail-closed)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/bostonaholic/team/principle-fail-closed"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/bostonaholic/team/principle-fail-closed/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-fail-closed

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/bostonaholic/team/principle-fail-closed"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/bostonaholic/team/principle-fail-closed.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 167 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 $0.00167
Opus 5 $0.00014 $0.00084
Sonnet 5 $0.00006 $0.00033
Haiku 4.5 $0.00003 $0.00017

Measured 4d ago against content hash 4de4613b6b65, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-09, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

principle-fail-closed 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-fail-closed/SKILL.md · 16 lines

What it actually says

Fail Closed

Reject any guarantee you cannot evaluate: Unknown counts as unsupported, a missing verdict counts as not passed, and inconclusive refutation keeps the finding.

  • Never advance on a missing or unparseable verdict; retry once with the error, then halt loudly.
  • Treat a failed capability check as unavailable and take the fallback path.
  • Let refutation remove only confirmed false positives; never soften severity on an uncertain reply.
  • Resolve ambiguous irreversible instructions safely, such as watching a draft instead of publishing it.
  • Apply this rule to guarantees; degrade failed enhancements loudly under principle-optimization-never-dependency.
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 · -14 lines · -14 tokens per session 4de4613b6b65
  2. 5d ago First seen · 30 lines · 42 tokens per session scan A 5d72c6f5d70e

Subscribe to this mod's changes

principle-fail-closed 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 167 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.

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