Skillscript

Upgrade impact: none (additive) for the documented usage — a {{secret.NAME}} marker written literally in a skill's shell/$ op still resolves exactly as before. Behavior change for an undocumented edge: a marker that is not in the skill source — one assembled at runtime from ${VAR} data or $set/$append — no longer resolves (it stays inert literal text). That path was never intended and was a leak; see below.

• Closes data-borne secret injection (adopter finding). Resolution used to run on the post-substitution sink string, so a {{secret.NAME}} marker that arrived via runtime data (a ${VAR} value containing the literal text) got resolved — e.g. an email body containing {{secret.AGENTMAIL_KEY}} would inject the real key into the outbound message. The runtime now resolves author-template-only: it masks markers written literally in the op template before ${VAR} substitution, then splices the values in last. A marker arriving through data is never masked, so it can never resolve — it passes through as inert literal text. (This also refines the var-smuggle edge: a marker built via $set/$append is data-borne and therefore inert, rather than resolving-if-declared.)
• Sentinel forgery neutralized. The masking uses a NUL-delimited sentinel; ${VAR} substitution now strips NUL bytes from every substituted value, so untrusted data can't forge a sentinel to trigger a splice. (NUL is never valid in skill data — spawn rejects it — so the strip is loss-free.)
• Unchanged guarantees: values never bind/emit/trace; the binary-allowlist gate runs before resolution; errors/traces render the marker, not the value; declare-before-spend (# Requires) is enforced on author markers; the three tier-1 lint rules stand. Verified end-to-end across shell(argv=…), shell(command=…), and $ connector.tool sinks; the data-borne and forgery paths have regression tests.

Two lint improvements from the same dogfood (both adopter-found):

• undeclared-var now scans shell(argv=[...]) elements. A ${VAR} reference inside an argv element previously escaped the undeclared-var (and unknown-filter, legacy-$(...)-shape) checks — the lint's op-text collection skipped argv. Now an undeclared ${VAR} in an argv element is caught at compile, like every other op position.
• New tier-2 space-separated-vars. # Vars: is comma-separated; writing # Vars: A B C silently collapsed into one malformed variable named "A B C" (the rest lost). The new warning flags any # Vars: entry whose name contains whitespace and suggests the comma form.