format-boundary

format-boundary is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from CrumbtrailDev/crumbtrail-cli. It costs 0 tokens per session (1,808 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A guide for finding bugs where a value changes meaning when it crosses between formats or settings, such as time zones, languages, calendars, or number formats.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to investigate incorrect dates, times, currencies, units, decimals, week calculations, and other values that are written in one context and read in another.
Why use it?
It helps explain errors that appear only at boundaries, such as a date shifting by one day or a decimal being read with the wrong separator.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Part of the crumbtrail-skills plugin — 13 skills shipped together

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.

agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/crumbtraildev/crumbtrail-cli/format-boundary
Any agent
npx skills add CrumbtrailDev/crumbtrail-cli --skill format-boundary
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/CrumbtrailDev/crumbtrail-cli

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Or install crumbtrail-skills, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 13 skills.

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 format-boundary

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/crumbtraildev/crumbtrail-cli/format-boundary.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/crumbtraildev/crumbtrail-cli/format-boundary)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/crumbtraildev/crumbtrail-cli/format-boundary"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/crumbtraildev/crumbtrail-cli/format-boundary.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 0 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,808 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
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 $0.00000 $0.01808
Opus 5 $0.00000 $0.00904
Sonnet 5 $0.00000 $0.00362
Haiku 4.5 $0.00000 $0.00181

Measured 4d ago against content hash db9bb7288ff2, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

format-boundary 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 4d 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.

plugins/crumbtrail-skills/skills/format-boundary/SKILL.md · 163 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 163 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

The timezone, locale or format boundary

A value is written in one context and read in another. The contexts disagree about a default: which zone a naive timestamp belongs to, which day a week starts on, whether a comma is a thousands separator or a decimal point, how many minor units a currency has, which calendar or numeral system the locale implies. The value survives the trip and its meaning does not.

Two properties make this family expensive. It clusters at midnight, at daylight saving transitions, at month and quarter ends, so it looks intermittent while being entirely deterministic. And it is a family rather than a site: fixing the one place a reporter noticed leaves every sibling untouched, which is why the same defect returns under a different label.

Symptom

A date is off by one day, or by exactly the offset between two zones. A report attributed to the wrong period at a boundary. A number rendered with the wrong separator, or a total out by a factor of a hundred. A week that starts on the wrong day. A duration or a unit shown in the wrong scale.

The strongest clue in the report itself is that the same value is correct somewhere else in the product. One representation is right and another is wrong.

What Crumbtrail can see

The most useful fact for this archetype comes free and is easy to miss. A recording carries an environment snapshot taken in the browser, and the ranked bundle exposes it as an environment block holding the user agent, the browser, the operating system, the viewport, the locale and the time zone the session ran under. That is the reporter's context, which is the thing you would otherwise have to ask for and would usually get wrong.

Beyond that, the point of the recording here is that the same value appears in several representations and you can compare them:

  • The request body, holding the value as the browser serialized it.
  • The response body, holding it as the server serialized it. Bodies are summarized when large and sensitive fields are replaced with a redaction marker.
  • The stored row, where the database adapter is installed, holding the value as the column actually contains it, with the before and after of any change.
  • Backend request records with routes and durations, where the backend SDK is installed.

Read the full file on GitHub · 163 lines

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. 4d ago First seen · 163 lines · 0 tokens per session scan A db9bb7288ff2

Subscribe to this mod's changes

format-boundary is a skill published in the GitHub repository CrumbtrailDev/crumbtrail-cli (0 stars, last pushed today), licensed MIT. It costs nothing until one of its globs matches a file; then it loads 1,808 tokens. 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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