frontmatter-guard

frontmatter-guard is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from cynthiajones34/GBrain. It costs 68 tokens per session (2,477 once invoked), scanned A, a copy of frontmatter-guard, MIT.

A validation and repair skill for YAML frontmatter, the metadata block at the top of a brain page. It checks pages for structural errors and can repair certain mechanical problems while keeping backup files.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to check brain pages for missing delimiters, invalid YAML, broken slugs, null bytes, empty metadata, or incorrectly quoted titles, and to repair supported errors.
Why use it?
Malformed metadata can break synchronization or make search results unreliable, and these errors may otherwise remain unnoticed.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Which agent this was written for is unclear — built for gbrain. Also seen: built for gbrain.

Not installable: its command points at a path on the author’s own machine, so it runs nowhere else. The line is /Users/me/brain.

Good fit Use it to check brain pages for missing delimiters, invalid YAML, broken slugs, null bytes, empty metadata, or incorrectly quoted titles, and to repair supported errors.

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Install

Getting it into your agent

There is no command for this one: it runs only inside a plugin, and the catalogue could not identify which plugin ships it. The source is linked below.

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

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 frontmatter-guard

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/cynthiajones34/gbrain/frontmatter-guard/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/cynthiajones34/gbrain/frontmatter-guard)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/cynthiajones34/gbrain/frontmatter-guard"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/cynthiajones34/gbrain/frontmatter-guard/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

agentmods 80×15 button for frontmatter-guard

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/cynthiajones34/gbrain/frontmatter-guard"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/cynthiajones34/gbrain/frontmatter-guard.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 68 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,477 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 95% copy Near-identical to another mod 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 $0.00068 $0.02477
Opus 5 $0.00034 $0.01239
Sonnet 5 $0.00014 $0.00495
Haiku 4.5 $0.00007 $0.00248

Measured 9d ago against content hash 5142ab53f542, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-10, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

frontmatter-guard 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 9d 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.

Origin

This is a copy

95% identical to frontmatter-guard — 4 lines differ, which has more behind it and is treated as the original. This page carries a canonical link to it rather than competing with it.

skills/frontmatter-guard/SKILL.md · 233 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 233 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Frontmatter Guard Skill

Convention: see skills/conventions/quality.md for citation rules; this skill is structural validation, not citation auditing.

Contract

This skill guarantees:

  • Every brain page is scanned against the eight canonical frontmatter validation classes
  • Mechanical errors (nested quotes, missing closing ---, null bytes, slug mismatch) are auto-repairable on demand with .bak backups
  • Validation logic is shared with gbrain doctor's frontmatter_integrity subcheck — single source of truth
  • Reports per source (gbrain is multi-source since v0.18.0); never silently audits the wrong root

Why This Exists

Brain pages pile up over months. Agents write them with malformed frontmatter:

  • Missing closing --- (entity detector bugs)
  • Unstructured YAML in meeting pages (ingestion bugs)
  • Slug mismatches (path renames not propagated)
  • Null bytes (binary corruption from copy-paste accidents)
  • Nested double quotes in titles (title: "Phil "Nick" Last")

Without a guard, these accumulate silently until gbrain sync chokes or search returns garbage. The guard makes the failure visible at audit time and trivially fixable.

Validation classes

Code Meaning Auto-fixable?
MISSING_OPEN File doesn't start with --- No (needs human)
MISSING_CLOSE No closing --- before first heading Yes
YAML_PARSE YAML failed to parse Sometimes (depends on cause)
SLUG_MISMATCH Frontmatter slug: differs from path-derived slug Yes (removes the field)
NULL_BYTES Binary corruption (\x00) Yes
NESTED_QUOTES title: "outer "inner" outer" shape Yes
NON_STRING_FIELD title/type/slug is an unquoted non-string scalar (e.g. title: 123, slug: 2024-06-01) No (quote the value)
EMPTY_FRONTMATTER Open + close present but nothing between No (needs human)

Phases

Phase 1: Audit

Run a read-only scan across all registered sources (or one with --source <id>).

Read the full file on GitHub · 233 lines

Files

What ships with it

1 file 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. 9d ago First seen · 233 lines · 68 tokens per session scan A 5142ab53f542

Subscribe to this mod's changes

frontmatter-guard is a skill published in the GitHub repository cynthiajones34/GBrain (0 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 68 tokens to every session and 2,477 once invoked, about $0.0003 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. It is 95% identical to frontmatter-guard, differing in 4 lines, and is treated as a copy.