lanekeep

Deterministic, AST-based architectural conformance checking for AI-generated and human-written code.

lanekeep enforces the conventions that live in your team's heads and your reviewers' comments — the ones a language model cannot infer from the code it is shown. Every rule is a codified answer to "the agent keeps doing this wrong."

It ships as a single static binary with no runtime dependency.

Languages

Each guide covers installing lanekeep in that ecosystem, configuring it, the built-in rules that apply, a worked custom rule, and the name-resolution behavior specific to that language.

brew install fmsouza/tap/lanekeep works anywhere, as does a binary from the releases page. Every channel delivers the same build, so the bytes are identical whichever you pick.

Whatever the project, the first two commands are the same:

lanekeep init     # detects the project and writes a config plus a starter rule
lanekeep check

New here? Getting Started is about a minute, end to end.

What it is

lanekeep is not a linter in the ESLint sense. ESLint enforces language-level correctness; lanekeep enforces project-specific conventions. The two barely overlap, and lanekeep replaces neither your linter nor your formatter.

A rule is a program, not a configuration entry. It declares a tree-sitter query that Rust matches at native speed, and a handler that runs only on matches — where it can loop, accumulate state, read other files and ask where a name came from.

That matters because the conventions worth enforcing are the ones specific enough that nobody else would ever write them, which is exactly the population a fixed vocabulary of predicates fails. See Writing Rules for the anatomy and the full host API, and each language guide for a worked example in that language.

Three things follow from who reads the output:

• Every rule carries its own fix. message, remediation and examples are mandatory fields, not documentation — they are the card fed back to whoever has to act on the violation, increasingly an agent.
• Output is deterministic. Violations are always sorted by (ruleId, file, line, column), and the sandbox withholds the clock and randomness, so two runs over identical input produce byte-identical output. An agent reading it twice must not see reordering as change.
• It runs in the inner loop. Agents and developers invoke it after every edit, so a warm run is measured in tens of milliseconds. The built-ins that ship as WebAssembly components are all under 115 KB, so loading them is noise — a 12.4 MiB compiled-TypeScript component that once cost new TypeScript projects ~6.5 seconds on their first run was reverted for exactly that reason. docs/architecture.md §15 has the ledger.

Rules are authored in TypeScript whatever language they check — that is the form to start from, and it is the one most teams already have someone who writes. A rule may also be a WebAssembly component, which is how four of the sixteen built-ins ship — two written in Rust and two written in Go; the other twelve run as QuickJS modules, three of them checking five of the six supported languages from a single source (every one but JavaScript). Every form reaches the same host API and is held to the same limits, and a config names a rule rather than its implementation. Configuration is neither — lanekeep.json is plain data, so a Go, Python or Rust team never writes a .ts file except when authoring an actual rule.

Using it

lanekeep check                  # the whole project
lanekeep check --staged         # only what is about to be committed
lanekeep check --since main     # only what changed against a ref
lanekeep check --file src/a.ts  # exactly these files, repeatable, no git involved
lanekeep check --watch          # re-check on every change, until Ctrl-C
lanekeep check --fix            # apply the safe fixes, report what is left
lanekeep check --profile        # per rule: where the time went, and what it looked at
lanekeep rules                  # what this project has configured
lanekeep explain <rule-id>      # one rule's card, without opening its source
lanekeep server                 # LSP for an editor, or --protocol mcp for an agent host

Exit codes: 0 clean, 1 violations found, 2 the checker could not run. A caller has to be able to tell "your code has problems" from "the tool is broken". --warn-only reports violations but exits 0, for a phased rollout.

Output formats via --format: human (default), json (versioned, stable schema), sarif (GitHub code scanning), and agent — token-minimal, grouped by rule rather than by file. Diagnostics always go to stderr, so piping into a parser works even when something fails.

Fixes are applied only when the rule marked them behavior-preserving; anything else is shown and never written. Suppressions carry a mandatory reason and an optional expiry, and a directive that does not work says so rather than silently doing nothing.

Configuration reference, CI recipes, editor setup and the MCP tool list are in the wiki.

How it stays fast with programmable rules

The usual problem with a native tool that runs JavaScript plugins is the boundary between them: dispatching into JS once per AST node means tens of thousands of crossings per file.

lanekeep dispatches once per query match instead. The query runs in Rust across a single shared parse; only matches reach your handler. That is typically two to three orders of magnitude fewer crossings, and it is the reason a Rust engine still earns its place once rules are programs.

discover paths (globs, gitignore-aware)
  └─> for each file, in parallel:
        cache key ──hit──> validate tracked deps ──> cached violations + facts
                  └─miss─> path and raw-text gates reject before any parse
                           └─> parse once ─> match queries in Rust
                               └─> invoke the handler, per match only
  └─> reduce phase: cross-file rules consume facts only, never parse trees
  └─> filter suppressions ─> sort ─> report

A warm run with no changes executes no JavaScript at all — every file is a cache hit.

Platforms

Prebuilt for macOS on Apple silicon, Linux on x86-64 and arm64, and Windows on x86-64. The Linux binaries are built against glibc 2.17, so they run on anything from RHEL 7 onwards.

No runtime is required to run lanekeep. Node, Python or Go is needed only to install it from that ecosystem, where it picks which binary to fetch. Nothing is pulled in as a dependency any of those ways.

Intel macOS is not prebuilt — cargo install lanekeep-cli builds it from source, and both the npm launcher and the Homebrew formula say so rather than failing obscurely.

Security

lanekeep is meant to run as a pre-commit hook and inside CI, which makes it a supply-chain target. Rules are executable code, so the posture is about confinement rather than absence:

• No ambient authority. A TypeScript rule runs in an embedded QuickJS sandbox and a WebAssembly rule under wasmtime; both reach exactly the host functions lanekeep exposes. fs, process, child_process, network and dynamic import are not restricted — they do not exist in the context. A component imports one interface and is refused at load if it imports another.
• No network access. Ever, in any mode, with no configuration that enables it.
• Filesystem confinement. Reads go through a tracked host call, confined to the project root. Writes happen only under --fix, only to matched files, only within reported ranges.
• Bounded execution. A per-invocation timeout, a global run budget and a per-runtime memory ceiling, none disableable — a rule that hangs a pre-commit hook is indistinguishable from a broken tool. Breaching any of them cancels the run and exits 2, rather than reporting a partial result as a clean one.
• Deterministic by construction. The sandbox withholds the clock and randomness, so a rule cannot introduce nondeterminism even by accident.

This bounds blast radius and makes third-party rule sets reviewable. It is not a boundary against someone who can already commit to the repository being checked. To report a vulnerability, see SECURITY.md.

Project status

Released and usable, on every channel in the table above — one build feeding all of them.

It is 0.x, and this repository treats that as semver does: a minor bump may break a public Rust API. Rule authors are insulated from that — host API methods and the config shape are additive — but pin a version if you embed the crates.

Known gaps, stated rather than implied:

• Two of the three performance budgets in docs/architecture.md §15 are not met. The cold budget is; they are targets, and that section says by how much and where the remaining time goes.
• No general type inference, by design. Name resolution is syntactic; a rule that opts in (requires: ['types']) gets a bounded within-file oracle that answers undefined rather than guess — see §1 non-goals and §6.10.

Documentation

The wiki is the place to start — it is task-shaped and organized by language.

In-repo, versioned with the code:

Contributing

Contributions are welcome, particularly new built-in rules and new host API surface. Start with CONTRIBUTING.md — ./scripts/setup-dev.sh installs everything and wires the git hooks, and just check is the same gate CI runs.

All work ships as squashed pull requests with Conventional Commits titles. main is protected and takes no direct pushes.

License

Licensed under either of

• Apache License, Version 2.0 (LICENSE-APACHE or http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0)
• MIT License (LICENSE-MIT or http://opensource.org/licenses/MIT)

at your option.

Unless you explicitly state otherwise, any contribution intentionally submitted for inclusion in this work by you, as defined in the Apache-2.0 license, shall be dual licensed as above, without any additional terms or conditions.