poll-loop-treats-an-unreadable-status-as-finished SKILL.md skillA
poll-loop-treats-an-unreadable-status-as-finished from wan-huiyan/agent-traffic-control is an agent skill: a SKILL.md folder an AI agent loads when a task calls for it.
mdr add wan-huiyan/agent-traffic-control/poll-loop-treats-an-unreadable-status-as-finished@v1.0.0Pins v1.0.0 in mdr.lock. Pin the fingerprint instead.
- Audit grade
- A, 17 of 17 checks passed
- Kind
- SKILL.md skill
- Repository
- wan-huiyan/agent-traffic-control
- Path
plugins/agent-traffic-control/skills/poll-loop-treats-an-unreadable-status-as-finished/SKILL.md- Versions recorded
- 1
- Latest version
- v1.0.0, committed Sep 17, 2026
- Size
- 13,429 bytes
- Repository stars
- 3
- License
- MIT
You are watching a long-running job you dispatched — a hosted batch execution, a remote build, a queued run — by asking its API for status on a loop, and the loop decides "finished" by pulling one field out of the reply and testing that the field is not empty. An error line, a fallback token or a truncated reply is also not empty, and `cut` without `-s` hands a delimiter-free line back whole whatever field you asked for — so the test passes on a reply that carries no status at all. Use when…
Collected from public GitHub. Every version is saved exactly as it was and never changes. Install it at an exact version with the mdr tool, and every file is checked before it reaches your agent. The main file is checked against the SHA-256 fingerprint recorded here, and the others against the fingerprints GitHub keeps for its source commit. The automatic checks below grade the latest version, and the same checks always give the same file the same grade.
What the file says
# A Poll Loop Treats an Unreadable Status as Finished
## Problem
A watch loop asks a remote system "is it done yet?" and has to turn the answer
into a boolean. The usual shape projects a few fields out of the reply, splits
them on a delimiter, takes one position, and treats a non-empty value as the
completion signal.
**Three things make that decision unsound, and they compound:**
1. **"Not empty" is the weakest predicate available.** An error line, a quota
message, an expired-credential notice, a proxy's HTML page and a
human-readable "unreadable" are all non-empty strings. None of them is a
status, and every one of them passes.
2. **A field POSITION is not a field NAME, and the splitters disagree about a
malformed line.** A projection that returns five delimited values gives you
five only while the reply is well formed. A reply with no delimiter at all
collapses to ONE field, and what your extractor then returns depends
entirely on which extractor you used: **`cut -d, -f5` hands back the WHOLE
LINE** whatever field you asked for, unless `-s` is given, while
`awk -F, '{print $5}'` and ordinary shell field splitting return empty.
…Read the whole file at its exact version.
How to install
mdr add wan-huiyan/agent-traffic-control/poll-loop-treats-an-unreadable-status-as-finished@sha256:93fa6b4946eb9a44The line at the top of this page pins the label v1.0.0, which is what most people want. This one pins the sha256 fingerprint of the contents instead, so it survives a label being moved. Either way the exact version is written to mdr.lock, and mdr install downloads and checks those contents again, so it installs them exactly or stops with an error.
[](https://markdownregistry.com/a/art_hl42mdz2jlwkfmz4)
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Versions
The registry has recorded 1 version of this file, committed on Sep 17, 2026.
Audit of the latest version
- pass: Frontmatter block present
- pass: Frontmatter declares a name
- pass: Frontmatter declares a description
- pass: Size between 200 bytes and 200 KB (13429 bytes)
- pass: No zero-width or bidi control characters
- pass: No instruction hidden inside an HTML comment
- pass: No link to an exfiltration or paste host
- pass: No credential-shaped string
- pass: No instruction to send local credentials anywhere
- pass: No text hidden with inline styles
- pass: No prompt-injection phrasing
- pass: No curl or wget piped into a shell
- pass: No recursive delete of root, home or parent
- pass: No instruction to read or print local credentials
- pass: No base64 blob over 200 characters
- pass: No link to a raw IP address
- pass: No script tag
Source
wan-huiyan/agent-traffic-control · 3 stars · license MIT · pushed 2026-09-22 · branch main
API
GET https://markdownregistry.com/api/v1/artifacts/art_hl42mdz2jlwkfmz4 GET https://markdownregistry.com/api/v1/resolve?ref=wan-huiyan/agent-traffic-control/poll-loop-treats-an-unreadable-status-as-finished GET https://markdownregistry.com/api/v1/blob/93fa6b4946eb9a44f6f1457978fc0fbba650f76f3a86988a84884f09c9768de3
Your AI assistant does the legwork. You hear about the deals worth your word. Hand yours the standing instructions at modelranch.com and it joins the network that reads files like this one.
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