redline-buddy

Local-first contract red-flag checker. Paste in a vendor MSA, get a plain-language risk memo — with zero data leaving your machine.

Existing contract AI tools send your documents to someone else's LLM. redline-buddy is the opposite: deterministic, auditable YAML playbooks, pure-Python heuristics, no API keys, no network calls. What you lose in nuance you gain in privacy and predictability — and every finding links back to the exact rule that fired.

Not legal advice. Heuristic checks, not a lawyer's judgment. Treat the memo as a draft for attorney review.

Quickstart

pip install -e .
redline review examples/sample-msa.md
# no --playbook? redline auto-detects the best bundled playbook (clear winner
# only — ambiguous docs fall back to saas-vendor and say so on stderr)
# or with your own playbook:
redline review contract.pdf --playbook saas-vendor
# see the playbook ranking without reviewing:
redline suggest contract.pdf
# list all bundled playbooks:
redline playbooks
# batch review: point at a directory of contracts, get a summary table + per-file memos
# (omit --playbook and each file is auto-detected independently)
redline review ./contracts/
redline review ./contracts/ --playbook lease-tenant
# machine-readable output for CI gates:
redline review contract.pdf --format json | jq '.finding_count'
# fail CI when a high-or-worse finding appears:
redline review contract.pdf --fail-on high || echo "contract gate failed"
# fail CI when the risk grade drops below B:
redline review contract.pdf --fail-below B || echo "risk gate failed"
# minimal local web UI (paste text, pick a playbook, get the memo):
redline serve
# the web UI now shows playbook descriptions in the picker, one-click
# "Copy fallback" buttons per finding, and severity filters on memos
# validate a playbook you wrote, optionally against a sample contract:
redline validate my-playbook.yaml --sample examples/sample-msa.md
# redline diff view: their language vs. your fallback, per finding:
redline review contract.pdf --format diff
# compare two negotiation rounds — what changed, what risk changed:
redline compare round1.pdf round2.pdf --playbook saas-vendor
# fail CI when the new draft introduces new high-or-worse red flags:
redline compare round1.pdf round2.pdf --fail-on-gain high

Comparing negotiation rounds

Contracts move in rounds: the other side sends "draft v2" and you need to know what they quietly edited. redline compare diffs the two drafts at the paragraph level and re-runs the playbook on both, reporting:

• 🚨 New red flags — findings present in the new draft but not the old one (with the offending language, why it matters, and quotable fallback text),
• ✅ Resolved — findings the new draft fixed (their concessions),
• 🔁 Reworded but still flagged — a rule still fires, but on rewritten language (they redrafted the clause; it's still risky),
• 📝 Text changes — every paragraph added, removed, or reworded, as +/- diff hunks.

Use --format json for machine-readable output and --fail-on-gain high as a CI gate: fail the pipeline when a new round introduces new red flags at or above a severity. Add --format html for a shareable comparison page you can send to your attorney. Try it on the bundled example:

redline compare examples/compare-round1.md examples/compare-round2.md

How it works

1. A playbook (src/redline/playbooks/saas-vendor.yaml) declares rules: severity, plain-language explanation, and checks (requires_any, forbids_any, forbids_unless, max_value).
2. The review engine runs every rule against the contract text and collects findings with excerpts.
3. Findings render four ways: a markdown memo (default), JSON (--format json) for CI gates, a redline diff (--format diff) — each finding as a unified-diff hunk with the flagged contract language as - lines and quotable fallback clause language as + lines, ready to paste into your counter-draft — or a self-contained HTML memo (--format html), a single file with inline CSS (no JS, no network) you can email to your attorney or save as a PDF from the browser.

Every rule carries a fallback: field: concrete, quotable clause language — not just advice — so the diff view gives you something you can actually propose back.

Risk score

Every memo opens with a headline: Risk score: 63/100 · Grade C — a deterministic 0–100 score (critical findings cost 30 points, high 15, medium 7, low 3) mapped to ToS;DR-style letter grades (A ≥ 90, B ≥ 75, C ≥ 60, D ≥ 40, else F). It also appears in JSON output (risk_score, risk_grade), in the batch summary table, in the web UI banner, and — most usefully — in redline compare, which reports the risk delta between negotiation rounds (Risk: C (63) → B (78) — improved).

Playbooks

Write your own playbook in YAML — see src/redline/playbooks/saas-vendor.yaml for the schema, or scaffold one:

redline new-playbook equipment-lease --description "Lessee-side review of equipment leases."

Input formats

Markdown, plain text, .docx (Word), and PDF files are accepted — all text is extracted locally with no network calls.

Scanned/image-only PDFs are rejected with a clear error instead of silently reviewing nothing. Pass --ocr to run those pages through Tesseract OCR instead — it needs the tesseract and pdftoppm system binaries (e.g. apt install tesseract-ocr poppler-utils), still fully local, no extra Python packages. If a readable PDF contains pages with no extractable text, the memo notes which pages were skipped.

Development

pip install -e ".[dev]" 2>/dev/null || pip install -e .
python -m pytest

License

MIT — see LICENSE.