guardrails

guardrails is the bundle that makes your conventions hold no matter who — or what — is writing the code. It layers deterministic enforcement at every point a change passes through, so a code assistant (Claude, Copilot) can’t quietly drift on formatting, linting, commit messages, or your guidelines.

What it solves

Code assistants are fast and mostly right, but they drift: a formatter skipped here, a commit message that ignores the convention there, a lint rule quietly violated. Any single checkpoint can be bypassed — a hook that only fires in one tool, a pre-commit someone runs with --no-verify. Drift that isn’t caught deterministically gets caught in review, or not at all. This bundle closes the gaps by enforcing the same standards in more than one place.

How it works

It’s defense in depth — the same conventions enforced at successive layers:

• Loop level — Octopus default hooks (auto-format, typecheck, block --no-verify, …) fire during the assistant’s edit loop. This bundle assumes hooks: true at the manifest root; setup.sh warns if guardrails is selected without it.
• Git level — enforce-precommit wires standards into the pre-commit hook, so they run on every commit regardless of which tool authored it.
• Editor level — enforce-ide writes IDE configs so the editor formats and flags as you type.
• CI level — setting qualityWorkflow: true in .octopus.yml materializes the quality CI workflow, closing the pre-merge surface.

A change has to pass the same bar at the loop, the commit, the editor, and CI — so there’s no single point to slip through.

What’s included

• enforce-precommit — standards enforced at the git layer.
• enforce-ide — standards enforced at the editor layer.

When to enable

When your team uses code assistants and wants deterministic guarantees — not hope — that formatter, linter, commit-message, and guideline conformance hold on every change, however it was made.