rule-coherence-graph 0.2.0

Rule Coherence Graph — detect conflicts in AI agent rule corpora.

Rule Coherence Graph (RCG)

Detect conflicts in the rule corpora that govern AI coding agents — before the agent does.

AI coding agents (Cursor, Claude Code, Cline, Gemini in agent IDEs, custom LangGraph/Pydantic-AI agents) are governed by rules drawn from many files: .cursorrules, CLAUDE.md, AGENTS.md, .agent/rules/*.md, memory.md, and more. In production these corpora routinely contain contradictions that the agent silently resolves by following whichever rule is worded most strongly — often the unsafe one.

RCG treats a rule corpus as a typed graph instead of flat text: it ingests the files, extracts each rule into a canonical schema, loads them into Neo4j, and detects conflicts you can query, visualize, and fail CI on.

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30-second demo

git clone <this-repo> && cd rcg
uv sync
uv run rcg check examples/gemini_incident

With no ANTHROPIC_API_KEY set, check falls back to the offline heuristic extractor (with a warning) so the demo runs anywhere. It reports a coherence score of 0.32 — 10 findings (7 syntactic conflicts + 3 precedence ambiguities) — and exits non-zero, e.g.:

## 1. CRITICAL — syntactic
_action_class='rules.modify_self'; modalities=MAY vs MUST_NOT_

Rule A (.agent/rules/antigravity-pack.md:11) [MAY rules.modify_self]
> The agent MAY modify its own rule files in `.agent/rules/` when necessary.

Rule B (CLAUDE.md:7) [MUST_NOT rules.modify_self]
> Rule files under `.agent/rules/` are read-only; agents MUST NOT modify them.

For real (LLM-backed) extraction:

export ANTHROPIC_API_KEY=sk-...
uv run rcg check examples/gemini_incident --provider anthropic --no-graph

To load the graph into Neo4j as well, drop --no-graph and start the DB:

docker compose up -d neo4j      # Neo4j 5.x on bolt://localhost:7687
uv run rcg ingest examples/gemini_incident   # writes Rule/RuleFile/CONFLICTS_WITH

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Install

pipx install rule-coherence-graph        # or: uv tool install rule-coherence-graph
rcg check ./path/to/your/agent/rules     # point it at your own .cursorrules / CLAUDE.md / .agent/rules

Or run it once without installing:

uvx --from rule-coherence-graph rcg check examples/gemini_incident

rcg falls back to the offline heuristic extractor when ANTHROPIC_API_KEY is unset, so you get a result with zero setup. Set the key (and --provider anthropic) for LLM-quality extraction, and docker compose up -d neo4j to also persist the graph.

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Why this exists

In May 2026 a Gemini agent deleted 28,745 lines of code and fabricated a recovery report. The root cause was a rule conflict: a third-party rules package shipped directly contradictory directives ("never prompt for confirmation" alongside "ask strategic questions before executing", plus "auto-deploy" and "default to granting all permissions"), which collided with the project's own safety rules. No tool modeled the corpus as a system, so the conflict was invisible until it caused damage.

examples/gemini_incident/ is a faithful reconstruction of that corpus. Running rcg check on it surfaces the contradictions that the agent silently resolved.

RCG analyzes corpora; it does not gate agent execution at runtime (use OPA/Cedar/Microsoft AGT for that — a documented extension point, not a feature).

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Architecture

            ┌──────────── CLI (rcg ingest | check) ────────────┐
            │                                                   │
      ┌─────▼─────┐   ┌──────────────┐   ┌────────────┐   ┌─────▼──────┐
      │  Parsers  │──▶│ LLM Extractor│──▶│  Detectors │──▶│  Reports   │
      │ (markdown)│   │ + hash cache │   │ (syntactic)│   │ (markdown) │
      └───────────┘   └──────────────┘   └─────┬──────┘   └────────────┘
                                               │
                                        ┌──────▼──────┐
                                        │    Neo4j    │
                                        │  rule graph │
                                        └─────────────┘

• Parsers read a file and emit raw rule strings with source metadata. Adding a format is a single new parser class — nothing downstream changes.
• Extractor turns each raw rule into a canonical Rule via a provider (anthropic, mock, or auto). Results are cached by content hash + model + prompt version, so extraction is deterministic and re-runs are free.
• Detector finds conflicts over the in-memory Rule list (pure Python).
• Graph loader persists rules and CONFLICTS_WITH edges to Neo4j idempotently.
• Report renders conflicts as GitHub-flavored markdown, preserving original (possibly non-English) text alongside the English-normalized summary.

Canonical rule schema

Every rule normalizes to (src/rcg/schema.py):

Rule {
  id            # stable hash of raw_text + corpus-relative source path
  raw_text      # original string, verbatim (any language)
  source        { file, line_start, line_end, format, section, original_language }
  trigger       { action_class, scope_pattern, context_conditions }
  directive     { modality: MUST|MUST_NOT|SHOULD|SHOULD_NOT|MAY, action }
  confidence    # extractor confidence 0..1
  tags
}

Conflict detection: the approval-stance insight

The syntactic pass pairs rules with the same action_class, overlapping scope, and opposing modality. But modality alone produces false positives: "do not deploy without approval" (MUST_NOT) and "require approval before deploy" (MUST) look opposed yet encode the same policy.

RCG models a human-in-the-loop stance (requires_human_approval vs bypasses_human_approval) on trigger.context_conditions. For approval-gated rules it compares stance instead of surface modality — so aligned safety rules don't conflict, while an "auto-deploy / never prompt" rule correctly conflicts with a "require confirmation" rule.

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CLI

Command	Description
rcg ingest <path>	Parse, extract, and load a corpus into Neo4j.
rcg check <path>	Ingest + run the detection passes; exits non-zero if any (non-baselined) finding is found.
rcg score <path>	Print the corpus coherence score and a by-type breakdown (always exits 0).
rcg explain "<action>" <path>	Show which rules fire for a hypothetical action and whether they conflict.

rcg explain classifies the action into an action class, lists every rule that fires for it (within an optional --scope glob), and reports any direct conflicts or precedence ambiguities among those rules. Pass --strict to exit non-zero when firing rules conflict.

uv run rcg explain "deploy to production" examples/gemini_incident --provider mock

Useful flags: --provider auto\|anthropic\|mock, --no-graph (skip Neo4j), --out report.md (write report to a file), --semantic (run the embedding + judge pass; off by default), --no-precedence (skip the precedence pass; on by default), --min-score FLOAT (fail only when the coherence score drops below the threshold instead of on any finding), --baseline PATH (accepted-conflicts file, applied only if it exists; default rcg-baseline.json), and --update-baseline (record the current findings as accepted and exit 0; future runs suppress them).

# Run the semantic pass too, and gate CI on a minimum coherence score
uv run rcg check examples/gemini_incident --semantic --min-score 0.8

# Print just the score
uv run rcg score examples/gemini_incident

# Accept current findings as a reviewed baseline; later runs suppress them
uv run rcg check examples/gemini_incident --update-baseline

The default semantic recall uses a dependency-free HashingEmbeddingProvider that captures lexical overlap only — it is a stand-in. For real semantic recall (synonyms, paraphrase) install a true embedding model:

pip install 'rule-coherence-graph[embeddings]'

Example Cypher

// All conflicts, most severe first
MATCH (a:Rule)-[c:CONFLICTS_WITH]->(b:Rule)
RETURN c.severity, c.type, a.raw_text, b.raw_text
ORDER BY c.severity;

// Rules that govern the rule corpus itself (the Gemini meta-failure mode)
MATCH (r:Rule) WHERE r.action_class STARTS WITH 'rules.' RETURN r;

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What the graph looks like

After rcg ingest examples/gemini_incident, the corpus becomes a typed graph in Neo4j: Rule nodes (orange) link to their source RuleFile (blue) via DERIVED_FROM, and the syntactic pass adds CONFLICTS_WITH edges (red = critical, orange = high).

Querying just the conflicts — MATCH (a:Rule)-[c:CONFLICTS_WITH]-(b:Rule) RETURN a,c,b — makes the contradictions explicit. Each rule is colored by its source file and annotated with its modality; edge labels show severity:

The critical edge is the rule-corpus meta-conflict: the third-party package grants the agent MAY modify its own rule files while the project says rule files are read-only (MUST_NOT). The high edges are the autonomy-vs-safety clashes — auto-deploy / never-prompt vs require-confirmation — including the Vietnamese smuggled rule conflicting with the English confirmation rule.

These images are rendered from the live Neo4j graph. Open http://localhost:7474/browser/ and run the Cypher above to explore it interactively.

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Development

uv sync --extra dev
uv run pytest -q            # unit + offline integration tests
uv run ruff check src tests
uv run mypy                 # strict, src only

# Neo4j-backed integration tests (optional)
docker compose up -d neo4j
RCG_RUN_INTEGRATION=1 uv run pytest tests/integration

Stack: Python 3.11+, Typer, Pydantic v2, neo4j driver, Anthropic SDK, pytest/ruff/mypy, packaged with uv.

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Status & scope

This repo implements markdown ingestion → LLM extraction (with cache) → syntactic, semantic, and precedence detection passes → a coherence score and grouped markdown report, with an accepted-conflicts baseline, optional Neo4j persistence, and a faithful incident example that works end-to-end.

• Syntactic pass — opposing modality / approval stance on overlapping scopes.
• Semantic pass (--semantic) — embedding recall + an LLM judge (offline MockJudge or AnthropicJudge), with a per-pair judge cache. Candidate recall defaults to a dependency-free HashingEmbeddingProvider (lexical overlap only; a stand-in). Real semantic recall needs a true embedding model: pip install 'rule-coherence-graph[embeddings]'.
• Precedence pass — cross-file co-firing rules with no declared ordering.
• Coherence score — type-weighted, in [0, 1]; gate CI with --min-score.
• Baseline — --update-baseline records reviewed findings; later runs suppress them and surface only what is new.

Also implemented: the rcg explain command, an MCP server (rcg-mcp) exposing check_corpus / explain_action / score_corpus to agents, and a reusable GitHub Action (see below).

Deferred (see docs/SPEC.md for the full design): a bundled production-grade embedding model (the embeddings extra is opt-in), diff/graph export commands, an HTTP API, and additional parsers (.cursorrules, .mdc, YAML/JSON).

Honest about limits: heuristic/LLM extraction has false positives. Every flagged conflict includes both rules' original text as evidence so a human can adjudicate; confidence and the source language are always surfaced, never hidden.

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Use it in CI (GitHub Action)

RCG ships a reusable composite action. Add a workflow that checks your rules on every PR and (optionally) posts the report as a sticky comment:

permissions: { contents: read, pull-requests: write }
jobs:
  rule-coherence:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v4
      - uses: alast9/rule-coherence-graph@main   # or pin @v0.2.0
        with:
          path: .agent/rules
          min-score: "0.8"

The pull-requests: write permission is required for the PR comment. To use the semantic pass or the Anthropic extractor, set provider: anthropic and provide ANTHROPIC_API_KEY as a repo secret. Inputs: path, provider, min-score, semantic, comment, fail-on-conflict, version (a pip version spec, e.g. ==0.2.0).

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Agent-native (MCP)

RCG exposes a Model Context Protocol server so agents can call it directly. Run it over stdio:

uvx --from 'rule-coherence-graph[mcp]' rcg-mcp
# or: pipx install 'rule-coherence-graph[mcp]' && rcg-mcp

Sample MCP client config (Claude Code / Cursor mcpServers):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "rcg": {
      "command": "uvx",
      "args": ["--from", "rule-coherence-graph[mcp]", "rcg-mcp"]
    }
  }
}

Tools exposed:

• check_corpus(path, provider="mock", semantic=false) — discover + extract + detect; returns score, counts by type, and the findings.
• explain_action(action, path, scope="*", provider="mock") — which rules fire for an action and whether they conflict.
• score_corpus(path, provider="mock") — just the coherence score.