principle-never-block-on-the-human

principle-never-block-on-the-human is a skill for Claude Code from ericlitman/open-pstack. It costs 46 tokens per session (347 once invoked), scanned A, a copy of principle-never-block-on-the-human, MIT.

A workflow principle that lets an agent continue with reversible work instead of waiting for approval at every decision.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it for ordinary code edits, notes, and task breakdowns; ask first only when the choice is genuinely unclear or the action cannot be undone.
Why use it?
It keeps progress moving while leaving the human free to review and correct the result later.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: user-invocable in frontmatter.

Part of the pstack plugin — 52 skills, 12 agents, 1 hook shipped together

Good fit Use it for ordinary code edits, notes, and task breakdowns; ask first only when the choice is genuinely unclear or the action cannot be undone.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/ericlitman/open-pstack/principle-never-block-on-the-human
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 ericlitman/open-pstack --skill principle-never-block-on-the-human
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/ericlitman/open-pstack

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install pstack, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 52 skills, 12 agents, 1 hook.

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-block-on-the-human

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/ericlitman/open-pstack/principle-never-block-on-the-human/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/ericlitman/open-pstack/principle-never-block-on-the-human)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/ericlitman/open-pstack/principle-never-block-on-the-human"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/ericlitman/open-pstack/principle-never-block-on-the-human/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-block-on-the-human

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/ericlitman/open-pstack/principle-never-block-on-the-human"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/ericlitman/open-pstack/principle-never-block-on-the-human.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 46 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 347 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 95% copy Near-identical to another mod 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 $0.00046 $0.00347
Opus 5 $0.00023 $0.00173
Sonnet 5 $0.00009 $0.00069
Haiku 4.5 $0.00005 $0.00035

Measured 9d ago against content hash f6089b83c8e1, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-08, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

principle-never-block-on-the-human 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 9d 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.

Origin

This is a copy

95% identical to principle-never-block-on-the-human — 2 lines differ, which has more behind it and is treated as the original. This page carries a canonical link to it rather than competing with it.

plugins/pstack/skills/principle-never-block-on-the-human/SKILL.md · 24 lines

What it actually says

Never Block on the Human

The human supervises asynchronously. Agents must stay unblocked: make reasonable decisions, proceed, and let the human course-correct after the fact. Code is cheap. Waiting is expensive.

Why: Every permission pause stalls the pipeline and makes the human the bottleneck. Since code changes are reversible and reviewable, a wrong decision usually costs less than blocking.

Pattern:

  • Proceed, then present. Do the work, show the result. Don't ask "should I do X?" Do X, explain why.
  • Reserve questions for genuine ambiguity. Ask only when you truly cannot infer intent from context.
  • Make the system self-healing. When you notice a problem, log it and fix it in the next round.
  • Supervision is async. The human reviews plans, diffs, and changes on their own schedule. Design workflows for review-after-the-fact.
  • Code is cheap, attention is scarce. A wrong implementation costs minutes to fix. A blocked agent costs the human's attention to unblock.

Boundaries:

  • Irreversible actions (force-push, delete production data, send external messages) still require confirmation.
  • Reversible actions (write code, edit notes, split tasks) should proceed without blocking.
  • Product direction comes from the human; execution should not block.
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. 9d ago First seen · 24 lines · 46 tokens per session scan A f6089b83c8e1

Subscribe to this mod's changes

principle-never-block-on-the-human is a skill published in the GitHub repository ericlitman/open-pstack (237 stars, last pushed today), licensed MIT. It adds 46 tokens to every session and 347 once invoked, about $0.0002 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. It is 95% identical to principle-never-block-on-the-human, differing in 2 lines, and is treated as a copy.

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