quale 0.8.3

Structural codebase analysis — no parsers, no config, any language

quale

A CLI that tells you what to edit, what to test, and what to leave alone. Works on any language, no ASTs, no config.

Quickstart

pip install quale

cd my-project

# For Humans: Review your current changes
quale review

# For CI: Automated gates
quale ci check origin/main HEAD

# For LLM Agents: JSON-formatted safety packet
quale agent guard src/my_file.ts

That's it. One command tells you which files to read, which test to run, and what not to touch.

What it solves

Every LLM guesses the wrong test file path on a plain prompt. They all guess src/foo.test.ts when the test is in tests/foo.test.ts. This is a directory layout problem, not a model quality problem.

quale reads your repo's structure and gives the model what it's missing. 900+ trials across 12 repos and 7 model families: the wrong-path mistake is universal, and quale fixes it every time.

Persona-Driven Commands

Quale is organized into namespaces tailored for how you work:

🧑‍💻 For Human Developers (Top-Level)

Command	What it does
quale review	Single human review summary: blast radius, test gaps, hub risk, clones
quale onboard	3-step onboarding plan (landmarks, modules, safe directories)
quale refactor-cost path/to/file	Estimate refactoring effort (blast + escape + clones + hub)
quale explore .	Onboarding map: best files to read first

🤖 For LLM Agents (quale agent)

Agents shouldn't waste tokens memorizing flags. Commands in the agent namespace inherently return optimized JSON/IR output.

Command	What it does
quale agent edit src/file.ts	File-scoped edit context and risk card in JSON
quale agent guard src/file.ts	Combined safety packet: guide + hub-risk + complexity
quale agent orient	Token-optimized structural repo map

🚦 For CI Maintainers (quale ci)

Command	What it does
quale ci init	Generates a ready-to-use GitHub Actions YAML
quale ci check base head	Runs structural CI gates (--fail-on-hub-risk, --fail-on-mirror-gap, etc)
quale ci comment base head	Posts the PR structural report as a GitHub comment
quale ci trend	Tracks CI metric trends over time

🔬 For Advanced Analysis (quale core)

Over 30 advanced mathematical and structural primitives (e.g., spectral-gap, heisenberg, capillary) are tucked away in the core namespace. See quale core --help for the full list.

How it works

Reads code as text. Splits on delimiters, counts phrase frequency per file, measures co-occurrence across files. Same pipeline for every language. Deterministic: same input, same output.

Limits

• Useless on a new repo (no structure to measure)
• Not a linter, coverage tool, or security scanner
• Verification peaks around 80%. When the candidate set lacks the right test, quale says so

Further reading

• docs/COMMANDS.md (full reference)
• docs/CI_INTEGRATION.md (CI setup)
• docs/EFFECT_HARNESS.md (methodology and results)