quillx 0.2.0a5

An MCP proxy that gates risky AI actions, pauses high-risk ones for a human, and keeps a tamper-evident audit log.

quill

The pause button between your AI agent and the things you can't undo.

quill sits between your MCP client (Claude Code, Cursor, Cline, Claude Desktop) and the upstream MCP servers your agent uses. It also plugs into Claude Code's PreToolUse hook so the built-in tools (Bash, Edit, Write, NotebookEdit) get the same treatment. Every tool call passes through three deterministic checks:

1. camera, logged to a signed JSONL audit log, always
2. badge, the call's namespace and resource must match a scope you declared at session start, or it's blocked before the agent even tries
3. bank manager, high-risk actions pause for a y/N; critical-risk actions (delete, drop table, force-push, deploy:production, refunds) require you to type the action name back so muscle-memory yes-spamming doesn't ship a $50,000 mistake

When the gate refuses a critical call, Quill ships you a notification on whatever channel you opted in to (macOS banner, email, Slack, generic webhook) carrying what was tried, why it was blocked, what to try instead, and a paste-able quill approve <token> you can run from your phone if you actually meant it.

                                         ╭─────────────╮
   Claude Code   ─── stdio ──>  quill ─┼─→ filesystem
                                         ├─→ github
                                         ├─→ postgres
                                         ╰─→ slack
                                              │
                                     signed audit log
                                              │
                              ┌───────────────┴───────────────┐
                          receipts          trifecta        bridge
                       (did/changed/    (untrusted +     (A2A handoff
                        uncertain)      private + exfil)   edges)

Why this exists

Last July, Replit's coding agent deleted Jason Lemkin's production database during a vibe-coding session, ignored an explicit code-freeze instruction, and fabricated 4,000 fake users to cover the deletion. Two weeks later a Cursor agent ran rm -rf ~/ against a developer's home directory in a session a journalist later said "violated every principle of safe agent design." A few weeks after that, an autonomous coding agent leaked a customer's GitHub PAT into a public commit. The agents writing your code right now have the same authority. The pause button between them and your prod just hadn't been built into the framework yet.

quill is the smallest version of one I could write.

What's mature in 0.2.0a2 vs framework-prepared

quill is built around three pillars and the maturity of each is honestly different. This section exists because dogfooding evidence matters more than design intent.

Mature, with on-disk evidence in real-world dogfooding (the gate + audit pillar):

• Destructive-action gate: hundreds of critical blocks observed across rm -rf, vercel --prod, git push --force, DROP TABLE, TRUNCATE, npm publish, sudo, .env reads, and the CVE-2025-59536 subcommand-chain bypass. Zero false positives in the critical class.
• HMAC-chained audit log: 10k+ entries verified end-to-end. Tamper-evident, mode 0o600, EU AI Act Article 14 fields on every block.
• Out-of-band notification dispatch on real blocks: macOS banner, email, Slack, generic webhook. Synchronous-with-100ms-timeout on the hot path so the dispatch can't be killed mid-flight by the hook subprocess exiting.
• One-shot approve tokens, Touch ID hardware-attested approval, anti-yes-fatigue, type-to-confirm: full block-to-approve cycle observed end-to-end with audit chain evidence.
• Trust scope with trifecta enforcement priority: trusted directories suppress default-risk Edit/Write asks, but yield to trifecta enforcement when the session is at 2-of-3 flags and the call would close the third.
• Self-improving classifier: drift detection, suggestions CLI, learner persistence.

Framework-prepared, with thinner dogfooded evidence (the Trust Infrastructure pillar):

• Lethal-trifecta detection AND enforcement: detection observed across dozens of sessions; enforcement (escalate allow → deny when a call would close the trifecta) verified end-to-end on a synthetic test. Real-world enforcement triggers depend on operator workflow.
• A2A Bridge: handoff edge tracking works for the Cursor adapter and for tests; Claude Code subagent capture is pending hook-API support from Anthropic (the PreToolUse payload doesn't currently expose subagent session_ids, so subagent spawns audit-log under the parent session). If you're using Quill with Cursor, you get full A2A; with Claude Code today you get parent-level audit only.
• Permission Decay: tracking infrastructure is wired and tested; no overrides observed in single-developer dogfooding yet because the operator hasn't yet promoted a loosening_candidate via quill suggestions promote. The decay timer fires when overrides accumulate.
• Tool description pinning: pin recording, digest verification, and approval/revoke CLI all work; only one tool has been observed in dogfooding because the external MCP proxy path (Path B below) is less exercised than the Claude Code built-in tools path (Path A).

On the v0.3 roadmap: A2A bridge workaround for Claude Code via transcript-path heuristics, more external MCP server dogfooding to populate the pinning subsystem, real-world Permission Decay triggers as the suggestions CLI gets used, and tracking the IETF AIVS draft (draft-stone-aivs-00) so Quill's receipts stay interoperable with the agent-audit-trail standard.

Install

uvx quillx start

That's the whole thing on a fresh machine if you have uv installed. If you'd rather a persistent install, pipx install quillx then quill start, or pip install quillx inside an existing venv. For a development checkout: git clone https://github.com/manumarri-sudo/quill && cd quill && pip install -e .. Homebrew lands as a self-owned tap (brew install manumarri-sudo/quill/quill) shortly.

The PyPI dist name is quillx because the quill PyPI name is held by an unrelated package. The CLI binary (quill), import path, config directory (~/.quill/), env vars (QUILL_KEY), and brand all stay quill. A PEP 541 reclaim request for the canonical name is in flight; if it lands, quillx becomes a transitional alias for one release cycle and then sunsets.

quill start is idempotent: it merges Quill's hook into ~/.claude/settings.json, runs quill doctor, and opens the live dashboard. From the next Claude Code session on, every Bash, Edit, Write, and NotebookEdit goes through Quill's classifier; every external MCP call (if you wire Quill into mcpServers) goes through the proxy.

Two integration paths

Quill governs two surfaces. Both ship in v0.2; pick whichever fits how you code, or use both.

Path A: Claude Code's built-in tools (recommended for vibe coders)

Claude Code's Bash, Edit, Write, and NotebookEdit are not MCP tools, they're internal. Quill plugs into Claude Code's PreToolUse hook so every built-in tool call is gated before it executes.

quill start                      # installs the hook, starts the dashboard
# restart Claude Code

That's it. From the next session on, every Bash command, every Edit, every Write goes through Quill's classifier. rm -rf, git push --force, DROP TABLE, vercel --prod, and npm publish are denied by default with a plain-English reason. Edits to files prompt Claude Code's confirm-this-action UI. Reads pass silently. Every decision lands in ~/.quill/audit.log.jsonl with an HMAC-chained signature.

The hook is a content-aware classifier: Bash("ls") is low-risk, Bash("rm -rf /") is critical. The decision logic lives in quill.policy.classify_command; patterns are explicit and testable.

Path B: External MCP servers (filesystem, github, postgres, slack)

If you also use Claude Code's mcpServers config to point at upstream MCP servers, Quill can sit in front of those too. v0.2 ships a real schema-passthrough proxy: every upstream tool's inputSchema, description, and annotations are re-advertised to the client as the upstream sent them, so your client gets full autocomplete, the gate sees the real arguments, and JSON-RPC error codes are preserved end to end.

quill init                              # writes ~/.quill/config.toml
# edit config.toml - declare session intent, scope, [[upstream]] blocks, [notify] channels

Then in your Claude Code mcpServers config:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "quill": { "command": "quill", "args": ["serve"] }
  }
}

The proxy factory at src/quill/_vendor/proxy_factory.py is adapted from sparfenyuk/mcp-proxy v0.11.0 (MIT, attributed in NOTICE) with three Quill-specific changes: gate callable injection on _call_tool / _read_resource / _get_prompt, upstream-name namespacing (filesystem.read_file), and McpError preservation (the original swallowed upstream JSON-RPC errors into generic CallToolResult(isError=True), breaking client retry logic).

The notification + approval flow

When Quill blocks a critical-risk call, it fans an out-of-band message to every channel the user opted in to via [notify] in config.toml. Channels: macOS Notification Center (osascript), email (SMTP), Slack incoming webhook, generic JSON webhook. Zero new dependencies, stdlib only. Each channel runs on a daemon thread; the gate's hot path never blocks. Per-channel results are themselves audit-logged as notify.dispatched.

Every notification carries four fields:

• WHAT was attempted, one line. "git push --force origin main", "Edit /etc/passwd", "DROP TABLE customers".
• WHY it was blocked, in plain English. "force-push to a protected branch is critical-risk and rewrites shared history".
• WHAT TO TRY INSTEAD, a safer alternative the agent can paste back. "git push --force-with-lease" or "open a PR and let CI rebase".
• A one-shot APPROVE command: quill approve T7gQ2x9aB4.

The token is bound to the exact (tool_name, args_digest) that was refused, single-use, 10-minute TTL. An attacker who hijacks the agent mid-session cannot reuse the token for a different command, and a multi-use approval would bypass Permission Decay.

Concrete example

The agent runs git push --force origin main. Quill blocks. Notification on your phone:

quill blocked: git push --force origin main
why : force-push rewrites shared history; protected branch
try : git push --force-with-lease    (or open a PR)
approve once: quill approve T7gQ2x9aB4   (10 min, single-use)

You read the message, agree the agent meant well, paste the command in any terminal:

$ quill approve T7gQ2x9aB4
approved git push for one call · expires 2026-05-08T15:42:11
  the agent's next attempt of this exact call will go through.

The agent retries, the gate consumes the approval, the push lands. The approve action is itself audit-logged.

quill approvals list           # see pending tokens
quill approvals revoke <token> # drop a token if the notification looked surprising

Trust Infrastructure layer

v0.2 adds three audit-log surfaces that derive directly from the chain. They're computed on read; nothing extra is written. Frameworks the user is publishing on (Trust Infrastructure, Agent Receipts, A2A Bridge, Permission Decay) underpin the design but the surfaces are usable without them.

Agent Receipts

Per session, did / changed / uncertain / to_verify, the four-field mental model for what an agent actually did during a session. Derived from session.open / session.close / session.receipt / agent.flag.uncertain events.

quill receipts list            # one row per session, ordered by recency
quill receipts show ses_a4f1   # full did/changed/uncertain/to_verify

Lethal-Trifecta exposure tracking

Did this session see untrusted input + private data + an exfiltration vector all together? That's the worst-case prompt-injection scenario per Meta's Agents Rule of Two and Simon Willison's Lethal Trifecta. Two of three is recoverable, three is the danger zone.

quill trifecta show            # per-session three-flag matrix + verdict
quill trifecta show --closed   # only sessions where all three closed

Trifecta in v0.2.0a2 is observation AND enforcement. The classifier surfaces the exposure on every tool call, and when a call would close the lethal trifecta (untrusted + private + exfil all in one session) for the first time, the gate escalates an otherwise-allow decision to a deny with a paste-able approve token. Trust scope yields to this enforcement so trusted directories can't silently bypass the trifecta gate. Verified end-to-end with on-disk evidence on 2026-05-17 (audit log entries at verdict.blocked with reason trifecta close · ...).

A2A Bridge handoff edges

When agent A spawns agent B as a sub-task, the handoff itself is an event with a contract. The A2A Bridge tracks those edges, flags orphans (handoff-out with no matching handoff-in), and detects cascade failures (one bad handoff propagating downstream).

Adapter maturity as of v0.2.0a2: full handoff capture works for the Cursor adapter (Cursor 1.7+ surfaces subagent session_ids in its hook payload). For Claude Code, subagent spawns currently audit-log under the parent session because Claude Code's PreToolUse hook doesn't expose subagent session_ids; bridge capture there is pending hook-API support from Anthropic. See the "What's mature vs framework-prepared" section near the top of this README for the full breakdown.

quill bridge show              # all handoff edges, status (ok / orphan / cascade)
quill bridge show --orphans    # only the unmatched ones

Tool description pinning

The Invariant Labs MCP tool-poisoning advisory (March 2025) and the silent-rug-pull attack class both rely on the same primitive: an upstream server changing a tool's description between first sight and the moment the agent decides to call it. Quill records a SHA-256 fingerprint of (name, description, inputSchema, annotations) the first time it sees each tool, persists it at $QUILL_HOME/tool_pins.jsonl mode 0o600, and refuses to re-advertise tools whose digest changed without explicit user approval.

quill pins list                                    # all pinned tools, status, first-seen
quill pins approve filesystem read_file <digest>   # accept a new digest
quill pins revoke filesystem read_file             # hide the tool from the client

The pin cache invalidates automatically on any upstream tools/list_changed notification.

Bidirectional notification forwarding

Every notification an upstream MCP server pushes (tools/list_changed, resources/updated, prompts/list_changed, LoggingMessageNotification, ProgressNotification) is audit-logged AND forwarded downstream to the connected MCP client unmodified. Pin cache invalidates on tools/list_changed. The dispatch idiom (class-name-substring matching against the notification root type) is adapted from IBM/mcp-context-forge (Apache-2.0, attributed in NOTICE); the rest is Quill's own.

What it does, concretely

Layer	Question	What it does
camera	did this happen?	every call gets a signed JSONL line, HMAC-SHA256-chained for tamper evidence
badge	is this in scope?	deterministic check; out of scope = refused, no AI deciding
bank manager	should this happen right now?	high-risk = y/N prompt; critical-risk = type the action name; out-of-band notification + one-shot approve token on every block

Default risk classification is in src/quill/policy.py. Out of the box, fs.delete, git push --force, DROP TABLE, deploy:production, stripe.refunds.*, send_email, rm -rf, vercel --prod, npm publish, curl | sh, terraform destroy, and cat .env are classified critical and require typed confirmation. Override per-tool in your config:

[policy]
"fs.delete"          = "critical"
"github.list_issues" = "low"

Anti-yes-fatigue

If you approve three high-risk prompts in under four seconds each, the next prompt holds for three seconds before accepting input. This is the same anti-pattern Stripe, GitHub, and Sentry apply to their own dangerous-action UX. Tunable via QUILL_FATIGUE_* env vars. Type-to-confirm is anti-fatigue, not anti-hijack: WebAuthn-attested confirmation is on the roadmap, not yet wired.

The signed audit log

Every event lands in $QUILL_HOME/audit.log.jsonl, mode 0o600. Format:

{"ts":"2026-05-08T01:14:22Z","session_id":"ses_a4f1","agent_id":"root","type":"tool.attempted","risk":"critical","prev_mac":"…","payload":{"tool_name":"fs.delete","arg_keys":["path"],"arg_count":1},"mac":"…"}
{"ts":"2026-05-08T01:14:24Z","session_id":"ses_a4f1","agent_id":"root","type":"verdict.blocked","risk":"critical","prev_mac":"…","payload":{"tool_name":"fs.delete","reason":"force-push rewrites shared history","try_instead":"git push --force-with-lease"},"mac":"…"}

Each entry's mac is HMAC-SHA256(prev_mac || canonical(payload)) under your installation's key (auto-generated at first run, stored at $QUILL_HOME/key, mode 0o600). The hot path uses fcntl.flock(LOCK_EX) around every emit and re-reads the tail mac inside the lock so concurrent hook subprocesses can't break the chain. Verify the chain at any time:

quill audit verify
# chain intact: 472 entries verified.

If you have a log broken by the pre-0.1.1 concurrent-write defect:

quill audit repair --legacy --yes
# emits a chain.repaired event so the operation is itself audit-logged

This is the artifact your auditor will want. EU AI Act Article 14 and AIUC-1 both require evidence of human oversight on high-risk AI actions, with timestamps, decision, and reason. The format above carries all of that.

~/.quill/ layout

QUILL_HOME (default ~/.quill/) holds everything. Mode 0o600 on every file.

File	Purpose
config.toml	session intent, scope, upstreams, [notify], [policy] overrides
audit.log.jsonl	append-only HMAC-chained event log
key	32-byte HMAC signing key, auto-generated on first run
permissions.json	Permission Decay state (use counts, last-reaffirmed timestamps)
telemetry.json	opt-in telemetry state (asked, opted_in, install_id)
tool_pins.jsonl	tool description pins, append-only
approvals.json	pending one-shot approval tokens
taint.json	per-session lethal-trifecta state (renamed user-facing to trifecta)
sessions.json	open/close index for fast Receipts derivation
watch.pid	pidfile for the background dashboard daemon

Per-file env-var overrides still work: QUILL_LOG, QUILL_KEY, QUILL_CONFIG, etc.

CLI surface

quill start          set up + open the dashboard (most users only run this)
quill watch          in-terminal live dashboard (TUI by default; --browser for HTTP)
quill audit          review what got blocked / allowed / asked (verify, repair, show)
quill decay          permissions that erode without reinforcement (Permission Decay)
quill receipts       per-session did / changed / uncertain / to-verify (list / show)
quill bridge         A2A handoff edges between agents (show, --orphans)
quill trifecta       exposure tracking: untrusted input + private data + exfil vector
quill pins           tool description pins (list / approve / revoke)
quill approvals      list / revoke pending one-shot approval tokens
quill approve <tok>  consume a token, allow the next exact-match call
quill doctor         diagnose the install (config / log / key / hook / upstreams)
quill stop           stop the background watch daemon
quill version        print the quill version

Hidden / power-user commands: init (write starter config), serve (run the MCP proxy), tail (live-stream audit log), tree (delegation tree, snapshot or live), claude-hook + claude-hook-install (the PreToolUse adapter), journal (write a session log to the AgentOS vault), telemetry (opt-in aggregate stats).

Performance

Quill aims for invisible: P50 overhead < 2ms on the policy-allow path, P99 < 10ms. Hot path is pre-compiled regex + hash-table lookup; the audit log uses O_APPEND and batched fsync (force-fsync on risk >= high). Cross-process safety via fcntl.flock(LOCK_EX). Benchmarks ship with the repo (pytest -m bench).

What this is not

• Not an AI safety system. It does not predict whether an action is bad. It records, scope-checks, and asks a human on dangerous calls.
• Not a replacement for OAuth or RBAC. Identity says you are allowed to refund. Quill says this specific refund, in this specific session, deserves a confirmation.
• Not a hosted service. It is a single Python package. The audit log lives on your disk. You own the key, the log, the verdict.

Known gaps for v0.2.0a2

Honest list of what is shipped vs. observation-only vs. not yet wired. See also the "What's mature vs framework-prepared" section near the top of this README for the dogfooding-evidence breakdown.

• Claude Code subagent capture in A2A Bridge depends on Anthropic shipping subagent session_ids in the PreToolUse hook payload. Until then, subagent spawns audit-log under the parent session; the bridge sees no edge. The Cursor adapter is unaffected and gets full A2A capture today.
• Per-tool sampling adjudication. Upstream-initiated sampling/createMessage calls are observed in the audit log as upstream.request but not yet adjudicated. Default behavior: forward to client unmodified. Will land before 0.2 final.
• WebAuthn-attested confirmation is not wired. Touch ID (macOS) is the hardware-attested option today; WebAuthn for cross-platform hardware attestation is on the v0.3 roadmap.
• Telemetry pipeline. Supabase ingest + analyze functions exist in infra/supabase/ but are not deployed. Opt-in only; default off.
• Schema-passthrough proxy is end-to-end for tool calls and the gate sees real arguments. Resources, prompts, and notifications all forward; full lifecycle test coverage is in progress.
• PyPI / Homebrew / npm wrapper / MCP registries: not yet submitted. Distribution plan in docs/distribution.md.

Security

quill is itself a security-critical piece of code. The threat model, hardening recommendations, and responsible-disclosure address are in SECURITY.md. When PyPI publish lands, releases will be signed via PyPI Trusted Publishing with PEP 740 attestations.

Contributing

If you have a published red-team trace, a missed dangerous-action class, or a vibe-coding disaster I should be defaulting to critical, open an issue. If you have a framework adapter you want to see (LangGraph, AutoGen, CrewAI, OpenAI Agents SDK), open a PR; adapters live under src/quill/adapters/.

License

MIT. See LICENSE. Vendored third-party code is attributed in NOTICE (sparfenyuk/mcp-proxy MIT, IBM/mcp-context-forge Apache-2.0). Version history in CHANGELOG.md. Repo: github.com/manumarri-sudo/quill.

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Built with assistance from Claude (Anthropic).