Ratchet

Your agent reads the rules. This checks whether it followed them.

A ratchet turns one way. Complexity in your codebase goes down or stays flat, unless someone deliberately turns it the other way and writes down why.

The problem

Every minimalism ruleset for coding agents is an open loop. You inject prefer the standard library, do not add dependencies, keep the diff small, the model reads it, and then nothing checks whether any of it happened.

Compliance is assumed. When the model drifts, which it does over a long session, nobody finds out until review.

What this does instead

The ruleset still goes in. But a PostToolUse hook reads every edit the agent makes, measures it, and reports what it found back into the same session, while the agent is still working.

you    add a date picker to the settings page

agent  [installs flatpickr, writes a wrapper component, adds a stylesheet]

hook   ratchet guard  ·  +71 -0 lines (net +71/150)  ·  2/3 new files  ·  1/1 new deps

       certain
         package.json:14        dep      new dependency flatpickr
                                         justify it against the stdlib and the platform, or drop it
         src/DatePicker.jsx:4   native   date picker component library
                                         
       likely
         src/DatePicker.jsx:22  wrapper  DatePicker only forwards to Flatpickr
                                         call it directly and delete the wrapper

agent  [reverts, ships ]

Nothing here depends on the model having felt persuaded by a system prompt.

Install

git clone https://github.com/0xwilliamortiz/ratchet.git
cd ratchet
npm install -g .

Then once per repository you want watched:

cd your-project
ratchet

That is the whole setup. It registers the hooks, starts measuring, accepts everything already in the code as a baseline, and opens the window:

ratchet is watching your-project

  hooks      C:\your-project\.claude\settings.json
  measuring  .ratchet\  (mark at 1284 lines)
  baseline   31 findings from before now accepted, only new ones fire
  window     opened ratchetui.exe
  plugin     C:\Users\you\ratchet

restart your agent so it picks the hooks up.

Restart your agent. Done.

Requirements. Node 20 or newer. Git on PATH for the measuring half; without