canary-shadow

canary-shadow is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from bop-clocktower/canary. It costs 142 tokens per session (1,516 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A testing method that runs the same command against a reference implementation and a changed implementation, then compares their results after removing irrelevant differences.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when porting code between languages or frameworks, replacing an engine, or checking that a behavior-preserving change really preserves output. It is not intended for new behavior with no reference version.
Why use it?
It shows whether a rewrite, refactor, or dependency change has altered observable behavior, including differences that ordinary tests may miss.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Written for no agent in particular: nothing here depends on one.

Part of the canary plugin — 22 skills, 13 commands, 8 agents, 4 hooks shipped together

Good fit Use it when porting code between languages or frameworks, replacing an engine, or checking that a behavior-preserving change really preserves output. It is not intended for new behavior with no reference version.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/bop-clocktower/canary/canary-shadow
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 bop-clocktower/canary --skill canary-shadow
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/bop-clocktower/canary

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Or install canary, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 22 skills, 13 commands, 8 agents, 4 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 canary-shadow

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/bop-clocktower/canary/canary-shadow.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/bop-clocktower/canary/canary-shadow)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/bop-clocktower/canary/canary-shadow"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/bop-clocktower/canary/canary-shadow.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 142 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,516 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 $0.00142 $0.01516
Opus 5 $0.00071 $0.00758
Sonnet 5 $0.00028 $0.00303
Haiku 4.5 $0.00014 $0.00152

Measured 2d ago against content hash c8cf56440774, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-07, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

canary-shadow 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 2d ago.

The scan reads SKILL.md. This mod also ships 1 executable file (scripts/cli.mjs), listed below but not scanned — reading those needs a real analyzer, not pattern matching.

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.

agents/skills/claude-code/canary-shadow/SKILL.md · 132 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 132 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Canary: Shadow (differential parity testing)

Run one invocation through two implementations, normalize the noise, diff the rest. Every un-accepted divergence is a behavior change to explain or fix.

When to Use

  • Ports / rewrites where output should be identical: Python→TS, a BoP skill re-port, typer→commander, one engine replacing another. (This is exactly how the v6 cutover was validated: run canary <cmd> through the TS engine AND the Python reference, diff. It surfaced a divergence the unit tests + golden suite missed — Python's rich console renders the ticket-marker hint # canary:ticket: as # canary🎫 via emoji-shortcode substitution, mangling a hint the parser can't match; the TS port printed the literal, correct marker. A console-rendering artifact only a live side-by-side run exposes.)
  • Skill changes — old skill vs new skill on the same inputs: "prove the rewrite is equivalent."
  • Refactors asserted to be behavior-preserving.
  • Framework / dependency swaps where the observable surface should not move.
  • NOT for greenfield behavior (nothing to compare against) — use asserted tests.
  • NOT as a sole correctness check — see the caveat at the bottom.

The idea (differential / shadow testing)

For each case, run the SAME arguments through a baseline command and a candidate command, capture {exitCode, stdout, stderr}, normalize both, and diff. Identical (post-normalization) ⇒ ok. Different ⇒ DIVERGE — a real behavior change, unless it's a documented, intentional difference recorded in the accepted-divergence allowlist.

The value is not the runner (two spawns and a diff) — it's the two disciplines below.

1. The normalization ruleset (get this right, or drown)

Output has meaningful content and irrelevant noise. Normalize the noise; keep everything else. Default masks (see scripts/cli.mjs): ANSI SGR codes, ISO timestamps, temp paths (/tmp, /var/folders, /private), version banners (vX.Y.Z[-rc.N]), commit SHAs, run-ids.

Read the full file on GitHub · 132 lines

Files

What ships with it

2 files 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. 2d ago Changed · +17 lines c8cf56440774
  2. 7d ago First seen · 115 lines · 142 tokens per session scan A ff02f3049312

Subscribe to this mod's changes

canary-shadow is a skill published in the GitHub repository bop-clocktower/canary (4 stars, last pushed today), licensed MIT. It adds 142 tokens to every session and 1,516 once invoked, about $0.0007 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 2026-08-31.

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