garuff 2026.7.0

Personal and opinionated Python linter rules aimed at coding agents.

garuff

Personal, opinionated Python linter rules aimed at coding agents.

garuff enforces a curated set of conventions that ruff and ty can't express — and it explains every one of them in terms a coding assistant can act on.

⚠️ Early days. The core linter runs — garuff check and garuff rule work today — but the ruleset is still small and there's no packaged release yet. This README describes the vision; the full rule reference and install instructions will land as the implementation does.

Why

Coding agents write a lot of code, fast. Keeping that code consistent means enforcing conventions — but enforcement alone isn't enough for an agent. A terse remove this tells a human who already knows the house style exactly what to do; an agent needs to know why the convention exists, or it will "fix" the symptom and reintroduce the cause a moment later.

ruff and ty are indispensable, and garuff is not a replacement for either. It fills the gap they leave:

• Conventions they can't express. Repo-specific taste — "return Self, never a stringized forward reference to the enclosing class", "every function carries a docstring", "keep agent-facing docs like ADRs consistently numbered."
• Messages written for agents. Every rule ships a rationale (why the convention exists) and a prescribed fix (the correct form), not just a one-line complaint.

What makes it different

• Agent-first by design. Each violation carries a terse summary to locate it, a rationale to justify it, and a fix to resolve it. Output stays scannable: the reasoning for each triggered rule is shown once, not repeated on every hit.
• Opinionated, not configurable-to-taste. garuff is a point of view, not a style engine. The rules encode one set of preferences; you don't tune them into something else — you take them or turn them off.
• Enforcement you control. Every rule is on by default. You can ignore individual rules, silence them per file, or suppress a single line inline — while the ruleset itself stays fixed.
• Zero dependencies. garuff is a tool you install into every project's dev and CI environment, so it leans on nothing but the standard library and drops in without dependency friction.

Using it

garuff check [paths] lints (no paths → the whole project root). Each violation is a terse locator line; once all findings are listed, an appendix explains each rule that fired — once, no matter how many times it tripped:

$ garuff check src
src/config.py:1:1: GAC001 no `from __future__ import annotations`
src/build.py:9:1: GAC008 `build` takes 3 positional parameters (at most 1)

  GAC001  no `from __future__ import annotations`
      why  Python 3.14 evaluates annotations lazily (PEP 649), so the import is
           dead weight — it buys nothing and every module has to carry it.
      fix  Delete the import:
               - from __future__ import annotations

  GAC008  keep positional parameters to at most 1
      why  Positional parameters past the first make a call site ambiguous — the
           reader has to count arguments and match them against the signature to
           know what each one means.
      fix  The limit is 1; move every parameter past it behind
           a bare `*` so callers must name them:
               def build(name, kind, size): ...     # before
               def build(name, *, kind, size): ...  # after
           ...

Findings go to stdout, one per line at column 0; the appendix is indented beneath them, so garuff check | grep '^[^ ]' filters the findings alone.

garuff rule <CODE> prints that same explanation on demand — reading the project's configuration, so a tuned option (say a raised max-positional-args) shows up in the text — and garuff rule --all prints the whole ruleset. A rule you've turned off still explains itself, and says that it's ignored.

Two kinds of rules

• Code rules — how you write Python and its prose: types, docstrings, naming, model and dataclass conventions.
• Agent-file rules — how a repository's agent-facing scaffolding is structured: ADRs today, more of the agent surface over time.

Status & direction

The domain model, the key architectural decisions, and the build plan are written down:

• CONTEXT.md — the project's glossary.
• docs/adr/ — the decisions and why they were made.
• docs/structure-plan.md — how the tool is put together.

Implementation is tracked as a sequence of end-to-end issues. This page will grow into proper documentation as those land.