The date string that invented $725 in a synthetic margin report

This is a submission for DEV's Summer Bug Smash: Clear the Lineup , powered by Sentry . Project Overview I built LeakLens Control Room to keep AI away from the financial math. Python calculates every dollar. The optional model explains the evidence. A human decides whether to act. LeakLens is a live, functional restaurant margin-review application built with Python, SQLite, HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. It uses synthetic data in the public demo. The optional application narrative provider defaults to GPT-5.6, but every rate, threshold, ranking, and dollar scenario comes from deterministic code. Then a date string proved that deterministic code can still lie. I had let a raw CSV field decide which operating day counted as "current." Bug Fix or Performance Improvement The symptom LeakLens groups channel metrics by date, sorts those dates, and analyzes the last one against prior days. That works when every input is canonical ISO data such as 2026-07-09 . The loader only checked that the date field was not blank. This input slipped through: metrics = [ DailyMetric ( " 2026-7-9 " , " direct " , 500 , 250 , 0 , 0 , 125 ), DailyMetric ( " 2026-07-10 " , " direct " , 1000 , 50 , 0 , 0 , 250 ), ] July 10 is later than July 9. Python's string ordering sees something else: sorted ([ " 2026-07-10 " , " 2026-7-9 " ]) # ['2026-07-10', '2026-7-9'] LeakLens selected the final string, 2026-7-9 , as the current day. That mistake spread through the report: expected current date: 2026-07-10 actual current date: 2026-7-9 actual gross sales: 500.00 sales-loss scenario: 500.00 discount scenario: 225.00 The input had not shown a current sales collapse or discount leak. The analyzer compared the days backward and produced $725 of false scenario impact from synthetic data. For a restaurant operator, this is worse than a visible crash. A crash asks for attention. A plausible financial report can send someone to audit the wrong promotion, question the wrong manager, or change a schedule that was