The Edison skill stopped teaching the spend path and shipped it¶

skills/lab-edison/scripts/edison-task.sh owns submitting a task, polling it, listing your own runs, cancelling one and fetching what one produced. The skill body and the reference pages point at it. They no longer carry a client call to retype.

Why a script and not a rule¶

The one failure this skill exists to prevent is a spent credit whose task id nobody holds. Until now the thing preventing it was an ordering rule — submit, print the id, only then poll — spread over two reference pages and re-typed at every submission. It failed in a real session: a paid run was recovered through task history. A rule that has to be remembered at the moment of spending is not a safeguard, it is a hope. The ordering is now structure: the id is the first line of output, before anything in the process can block.

Two more properties come with it. The command runs the preflight itself and relays its remedy, so a skipped step zero refuses instead of spending — which matters most in an agent tool that loads this skill unasked, as Codex did before the skill shipped Codex's opt-out file.

Why submission takes a file¶

--query-file, never an inline string. The artefact the user confirmed becomes a real file, so "show before you spend" is structural rather than remembered, and what was approved and what was paid for are the same bytes. An absent or empty file is refused before the network is touched.

Rejected¶

A dry-run default gated by a flag. The safety is advisory and the flag is one token away.

Splitting by cost: a free read-only helper, with submission left as prose. That is the observed failure preserved — a rule where the structure should be.

What is unchanged¶

The never-transmit property of docs/adr/0007-edison-key-file-and-never-transmit.md. The key is sourced from the key file into the environment the client inherits: never an argument, never on a command line, never echoed, never in the program text. The gate asserts all three against a stub, and asserts the key did arrive, so the absence proves something.

The preflight is not folded in. It keeps its path and shape, so the parallel with the cluster preflight survives and the read-only check stays separable from the command that spends.