Raccoon daemon · the forge-side reviewer

The Raccoon is hungry.
It works the night shift.

It forages every diff for AI slop (the confident-but-wrong output a model produces under pressure) and it eats bugs for breakfast. It drains webhook queues, reviews allowlisted repos, stores evidence, and posts advisory notes. It never merges, never closes, never deletes. It reviews, and the human decides.

Never auto-merges, never closes, never deletes. That is a source-level guarantee in the binary, not a config option someone can flip. The Raccoon posts advisory labels — Sober in review, Sober clean, Sober findings, Sober blocked, or Sober error — and stops. Merge authority stays with the human, because in the environments Sober is built for, the merge is a responsibility.

What the Raccoon watches

The raccoon is the daemon: a quiet background worker that drains webhook queues, reviews allowlisted repos, stores evidence, and posts advisory forge notes. It does not auto-merge, close MRs, or delete branches.

Forgejo + GitLab: Signed webhooks, mention aliases, catchup for missed events.
Advisory labels: Sober in review, Sober clean, Sober findings, Sober blocked, or Sober error.
Podman-ready: Sober Enterprise Container or Debian community image; scp + load, no public registry required.
Deploy anywhere: Container images integrate natively with Forgejo + GitLab for remote team forges — and run locally just as well. The systemd service is the natural fit for local machines; the plain binary works fine on a remote server.

[Service]
ExecStart=/usr/local/bin/sober raccoon run \
  --repo /srv/repo \
  --profile background
Restart=on-failure
Nice=10
IOSchedulingClass=idle

gunzip -c sober-ee_latest_linux_amd64.tar.gz | podman load
podman run --rm \
  -e SOBER_SECRETS_BACKEND=env \
  --env-file /etc/sober/secrets.env \
  -v /etc/sober/raccoon.kdl:/etc/sober/raccoon.kdl:ro \
  -v /var/lib/sober:/var/lib/sober \
  localhost/sober-enterprise:latest \
  raccoon forge catchup --once

*/5 * * * * cd /srv/repo && \
  sober raccoon run --once --json \
  >> .sober/raccoon.log 2>&1

time=12:41:02 level=info msg="raccoon started" time=12:41:03 level=info msg="claimed review job" time=12:41:18 level=info msg="evidence stored" time=12:41:20 level=info msg="waiting idle"

The Sober Raccoon wearing a review vest at a workbench, pointing at a monitor that flags critical AI-generated slop in a code review, surrounded by review logs and a bowl labeled AI slop. — Review log #19 — slop detected, evidence stored, merge authority untouched.

raccoon.kdl — the daemon's allowlist

The daemon only acts on repos you name. The /etc/sober/raccoon.kdl file is a plain-text KDL with one stanza per repo:

provider "forgejo"
token_env "FORGEJO_TOKEN"
workdir "/var/lib/sober/repos"
store_root "/var/lib/sober/stores"

repo "janus/janus-lang" remote="/opt/forgejo/data/forgejo/git/repositories/janus/janus-lang.git" branch="unknown" review_on_push=true
repo "libertaria/libertaria-stack" remote="/opt/forgejo/data/forgejo/git/repositories/libertaria/libertaria-stack.git" branch="main"
repo "libertaria/dmp" remote="/opt/forgejo/data/forgejo/git/repositories/libertaria/dmp.git" branch="master" disabled=true   # opt-out

The branch field defaults to whatever the forge considers the default branch. review_on_push=true turns bare pushes into review runs (default false — the daemon only reviews PR/MR lifecycle events). disabled=true opts a repo out of every cycle while keeping it in the doctor allowlist so the opt-out is auditable. Full field reference lives in docs/connectors-and-routes.md.

Keep the forge moving as agents multiply

More pull requests need clearer evidence and a fair queue.

Coverage you can check

Large diffs are reviewed in bounded chunks, including files larger than one chunk. Unreviewed files are named and coverage stays incomplete; synthesis cannot turn a gap into a clean review.

A queue that follows the work

Workers take turns across repositories. A moved PR head replaces its queued review, while transient provider throttles get bounded retries. Review receipts show the triggering request and revision.

Service errors stay service errors

A failed model request gets a job reference, not a fabricated finding against the code. Administrators can inspect provider attempts while credentials stay out of public failure comments.

Your infrastructure, both architectures

CE and EE quarterly images run on Linux AMD64 and ARM64. The client also ships Debian 12/13 packages and Nix support on both; Arch/AUR serves AMD64.

Release and installation details →

Talk to the Raccoon from any MR comment

On any repo it watches, mention @sober to explain a finding, summarize a review, rerun a review, or record a false-positive verdict — all recorded in evidence, all advisory.

Install Sober — Free Enterprise hardened image

The Raccoon is hungry.It works the night shift.