Product · deterministic guardrails + your own model review
Local mode is the second thought at the keyboard: preflight, review, and evidence before code leaves your machine. The Raccoon is the forge-side gatekeeper that reviews MRs and PRs without taking merge authority away from humans. Both are advisory. Both are yours.
Two jobs, one product. Local mode is the second thought at the keyboard. Raccoon is the forge-side gatekeeper that reviews MRs and PRs without taking merge authority away from humans.
Run status, preflight, and review before commit or push. State
lives under .sober/. Nothing is published unless you
run an explicit write command.
sober status
sober preflight --base main
sober review --base main
sober forge post --merge-request 42Webhooks from Forgejo or GitLab enqueue jobs. Raccoon reviews the MR worktree, stores evidence, posts append-only notes, and can set advisory labels. Humans still merge.
sober raccoon forge serve-webhook \
--config /etc/sober/raccoon.kdl \
--listen 0.0.0.0:8787
sober raccoon forge catchup --onceRead real repo state before any model call.
sober statusSecrets, private metadata, shell danger, prompt injection.
sober preflightRoute to local or approved remote models under your policy.
sober reviewSQLite store keeps runs, findings, jobs, memory, resume packs.
sober plan evidenceOptional write: one append-only note, optional advisory labels.
sober forge postThis is what state-of-the-art code review looks like in the agentic era: deterministic guardrails that run in milliseconds, model review with evidence you can inspect, and a forge daemon that never auto-merges. Built for the age of agent-generated code — and for the humans who have to live with it.
sober hooks install all wires pre-commit, pre-merge,
and pre-push to run deterministic preflight — no model, works
offline, catches secrets and slop before they leave your machine.
Each finding gets a stable ID (F-49, F-720).
sober explain F-49 shows severity, evidence, the exact
source line, a suggested fix, and copy-paste verify commands.
--polish adds a plain-language model summary.
No model required. Pattern-matches secrets, private files, unsafe
eval(/exec( calls, curl|sh
pipes, and AI-slop shapes. Tightened to stop
false-positives on comments and test fixtures; a later release kills
the identifier-substring and fixture-URL false-positive classes.
a later release adds the agent-hook detector — flags
.claude/settings.json SessionStart hooks, VS Code
folderOpen tasks, and npm lifecycle scripts that
fetch runtimes (the Shai-Hulud worm surfaces).
local (Ollama, default), daily,
frontier, security. Each with its own
budget, privacy classification, and endpoint chain. BYOK — your
keys, your providers, your call-home policy.
The Raccoon daemon posts evidence and sets advisory labels
(Sober clean, Sober findings,
Sober error). Merge authority stays with the human.
Always. By design.
Every reviewer profile includes a non-negotiable anti-slop floor: reject rubber-stamp LGTM, untested paste, vendored junk. AI-assisted code is assumed; the demand is evidence, not approval.
10 languages reason, 320 route. Sober parses 320
tree-sitter grammars and extracts review-relevant AST facts —
functions, calls, auth/db calls, defers, injection sinks — for
Go, Rust, Zig, Janus, Python, JavaScript, TypeScript,
TSX, C, and Bash. Bash is the highest-stakes surface:
eval, exec, source sinks.
Adding a language's reasoning is one declarative
.scm query file — no hand-coded extractor per
language. --auto-provision recovers a missing grammar
during review; local_only routes stay hermetically
offline by constitutional design.
Sober adapts to whoever is writing the code. Senior engineers get signal, not noise. Junior developers get a reviewer that teaches. Same product, two professional modes — and the human keeps merge authority in both.
We dissected Intercom's AI-approval case study — their numbers, their guardrails, and where Sober is honest about the gap. Read the teardown →
You've been burned by agentic coding: rubber-stamp LGTMs, untested paste, and review bots that never shut up. Senior mode assumes high skill and reviews for long-term ownership — contracts, tests, the future maintainer reading this code. It leads with blockers only, skips the mentoring essays, and prefers an empty findings list when the diff is sound. Signal. Nothing else.
reviewer "senior" objective="maintainability" style="maintainer"Onboard juniors with a reviewer that actually teaches. Teaching mode separates true blockers from teaching notes, explains the tradeoffs behind every fix, and carries up to six prior reviews on the branch — so the Raccoon mentors against history instead of restarting from zero. Your juniors level up in public. Your seniors keep their peace.
group_rule "junior-interns" reviewer="junior" style="teaching"Deterministic preflight before the commit. Your own model review before the push. Advisory evidence on the forge. And no auto-merge path in the binary — because the merge decision is a responsibility, not a convenience.