git-agent-verdict

git-agent-verdict is a CLI tool that blocks agents from committing code that does not comply with your organization's standards. It uses git's built-in commit-msg hook to enforce that every commit carries a passing verdict. Built for repos where an agent is the sole maintainer and no human is expected to see the diff before it lands.

Review is mandatory, and happens before the commit exists.

No self-review. The tool invokes the reviewer, not the agent, and the one line the agent supplies is auto-rejected if it argues for the change instead of stating what it does.

The verdict rides in the commit, with the neutral intent as the subject. git log is the audit trail: what changed, who reviewed it, what they found.

Expected agent usage

The agent finds the tool by hitting it. Nothing has to be read first.

Bash(git commit -am "add retry to the uploader")
  ⎿ git-agent-verdict: error: standards: no reviewable trailer
    use `git agent-verdict attest --intent "<one line>"` to commit

The agent states in one neutral line what the diff does, spawns the reviewer, and waits for it.

Bash(git agent-verdict attest --intent "retry a failed upload three times")
  ⎿ git-agent-verdict: spawned attestation process (pid 48213)
    use `git agent-verdict await` to wait for it

Bash(git agent-verdict await)
  ⎿ git-agent-verdict: BLOCKED
    1-standards.log  # BLOCKED
    address the reported findings, then: git agent-verdict attest

The agent reads the log, fixes the MAJOR findings, and attests again. A gate that has passed is not re-reviewed. Committing is its own call, so findings under a passing verdict are read before anything lands.

Bash(git agent-verdict commit)
  ⎿ [main 3f9a1c2] retry a failed upload three times
    Reviewed-standards: reviewer=claude-opus-5 major=0 moderate=2 minor=1 token=1f0c...
    Reviewed-docs: reviewer=claude-opus-5 major=0 moderate=0 minor=0 token=8ba7...

Install

cargo install git-agent-verdict
git config --global agent-verdict.runner claude

Installs as git agent-verdict.

Configure a repo

Declare one gate per line in the commit-msg hook. Line order is review order, and the gate name becomes the trailer key.

#!/usr/bin/env bash
set -euo pipefail
git agent-verdict --require-version 2.0

git agent-verdict "$1" standards --model opus \
  --standard programming --standard testing --path .

git agent-verdict "$1" docs --simple --doc docs/house-style.md --path "*.md"

.git/hooks/commit-msg is the standard location and needs no configuration, but git does not track it, so each clone and each agent would install its own. To make the gates a property of the repo, commit the hook and point git at it:

chmod +x .githooks/commit-msg
git config core.hooksPath .githooks

git agent-verdict --repo-setup-guide prints the full reference: every flag a declaration takes, what --simple and --read-only change, and how to feed a gate a rubric that lives outside the repo. --help is the flag grammar.

Contributing

The reviewer runs on Claude Code today. Please help us add support for other agents. The seam is src/runner.rs and src/agent.rs: an agent is an argv, a session, and an answer this tool parses verdicts out of. Nothing above that layer knows which one answered.