principle-never-interpolate

principle-never-interpolate is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from bostonaholic/team. It costs 27 tokens per session (269 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A shell-safety rule for handling text and values from outside a command. It keeps prose out of command text and checks simple values against an exact character list before use.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when building shell commands from issue bodies, file contents, branch names, IDs, or other external input.
Why use it?
It prevents untrusted text from being interpreted as shell code, including inside quoted strings or heredocs. This reduces the risk that issue text, files, or other input runs commands with your permissions.

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 building shell commands from issue bodies, file contents, branch names, IDs, or other external input.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/bostonaholic/team/principle-never-interpolate
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-never-interpolate
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-never-interpolate

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/bostonaholic/team/principle-never-interpolate/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/bostonaholic/team/principle-never-interpolate)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/bostonaholic/team/principle-never-interpolate"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/bostonaholic/team/principle-never-interpolate/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-never-interpolate

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/bostonaholic/team/principle-never-interpolate"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/bostonaholic/team/principle-never-interpolate.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 27 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 269 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 $0.00027 $0.00269
Opus 5 $0.00014 $0.00134
Sonnet 5 $0.00005 $0.00054
Haiku 4.5 $0.00003 $0.00027

Measured 4d ago against content hash 8cd9f2d497da, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-09, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

principle-never-interpolate 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-never-interpolate/SKILL.md · 18 lines

What it actually says

Never Interpolate

Never place untrusted prose in shell command text; pass it by file (--body-file, -F body=@-), stdin, or environment into an unchanged declared command.

  • Do not trust quoting: double quotes still execute $(...) and backticks; heredoc delimiter lines end the heredoc and expose remaining text to the shell.
  • Put only same-invocation, byte-exact allowlisted scalars or guarded "${VAR:?}" expansions into command text.
  • Validate branch names and IDs with LC_ALL=C character allowlists; refuse failures without normalization. Syntax checkers do not make shell input safe.
  • Terminate options with -- unless position fixes the value's role and its allowlist forbids leading -.
  • Before destructive path use, require containment under the expected root, no .., and no symlink.
  • Capture, validate, and use in the SAME invocation because shell state does not persist.
  • Expand destructive or gate inputs as "${VAR:?}"; before command substitution, guard consumed values with standalone : "${VAR:?}".
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 · -22 lines · -25 tokens per session 8cd9f2d497da
  2. 6d ago First seen · 40 lines · 52 tokens per session scan A 1288b93d2207

Subscribe to this mod's changes

principle-never-interpolate is a skill published in the GitHub repository bostonaholic/team (11 stars, last pushed today), licensed MIT. It adds 27 tokens to every session and 269 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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