Structural Ratchet
A committed baseline holds each file’s structural high-water mark. A file you touch may improve or stay equal, never regress. Untouched legacy is never punished.
Superpowers
Every one of them exists to close the same gap: between what a model can write and what a codebase can carry.
Iron Law Pattern
Zero drift from your standards.
Every scaffold loads the canonical example first. No guessing, no hallucinating patterns.
The mechanisms
Ten of them. You need to understand two: the ratchet, which is why your codebase cannot get worse, and correction learning, which is why you stop repeating yourself. The other eight run without being asked.
A committed baseline holds each file’s structural high-water mark. A file you touch may improve or stay equal, never regress. Untouched legacy is never punished.
Three contradictors attack a design before any code exists. Every objection lands in a retained or dismissed table.
“Done” requires proof. A failing test run revokes a verification that already exists.
A fix that recurs three times across three files becomes a candidate you approve.
Every scaffold loads the canonical example before it writes a line.
Catches acceleration, scope creep and over-optimisation in your prompts, not the model’s.
15 core rules plus everything your pack adds, inherited global to project to directory. Legacy coexists with strict new code.
Opening a repository is not consenting to run it. A project file can never grant itself permission.
One rule set, four providers, identical to the hooks.
adapters/hermes refuses a conclusion rather than a write, because blocking a write assumes somebody can break the loop, and an autonomous agent has nobody.

Free & open source
The core gate runs entirely on your machine and costs nothing. Agent hooks are optional and cost cents per session. Two commands, one restart, and the next write is checked.
Install it now