The full upstream README, mirrored here for reference. Install config, tool schemas, adoption signals, and an original overview live on the Code Auditor MCP listing page.
Architectural invariants enforced inside your AI agent's edit loop. When the agent writes code that breaks a project rule, Code Auditor catches it and blocks the edit. The agent sees the rule's message and fixes itself.
Two commands to install everywhere. code-audit install --agent all copies the skill to every AI coding tool on your machine. Use --agent for specific tools.
What you get per tool: the skill (SKILL.md), MCP server access, and hook wiring where the tool supports it (blocking on Claude Code and Codex, advisory on Cursor).
Claude Code users can also install via plugin:
The hook auto-installs the auditor on first use via npx.
node:sqlite module, so nothing needs to compile or
download a prebuilt binary on install.better-sqlite3, an
optional dependency whose install script must be approved once on npm
11.2+/12 (they block dependency install scripts by default):
npm install-scripts approve better-sqlite3 && npm rebuild better-sqlite3
(with pnpm: pnpm approve-builds, then select better-sqlite3)."Index the codebase and run a full audit, then walk the violations file-by-file with code-audit next-file."
"Create a .codeauditor.json that bans lodash imports and prevents src/languages/ from importing anything in src/analyzers/."
"Run a full audit, fix the highest-priority file, and repeat code-audit next-file until the tree is clean."
"Sync the code index and audit only what changed vs main."
"Add an ast-pattern rule that blocks new Function(...)."
"Add a naming rule requiring hooks in src/hooks/ to start with use."
"Add a call-constraint so chargeCustomer() in src/services/payment.ts can only be called from src/api/."
Seven kinds. The agent writes them to .codeauditor.json. Bad configs fail the audit, not silently.
| Kind | What it blocks |
|---|---|
import-ban | Banned module imports |
call-constraint | Function calls from unauthorized files |
module-boundary | Imports across module boundaries |
naming | Exported symbols not matching a pattern |
ast-pattern | AST nodes matching an ast-grep pattern |
style-mechanism | Unapproved style mechanisms per file/glob |
no-raw-values | Hardcoded values for specific CSS properties |
One skill, one CLI, one MCP server. Every agent gets the same audit engine — the hook contract is the only difference.
| Agent | Skill | Hooks / Blocking | MCP | Verified |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Claude Code | Plugin or code-audit install | Yes — blocking | Yes | 2026-07-19 |
| Cursor | code-audit install --agent cursor (project-only) | Advisory | Yes | 2026-07-19 |
| Codex | code-audit install --agent codex + plugin | Yes — blocking | Yes | 2026-07-19 |
| Gemini CLI | code-audit install --agent gemini | No | Yes | 2026-07-19 |
| VS Code / Copilot | code-audit install --agent agents | No | Yes | 2026-07-19 |
| Other SKILL.md tools | code-audit install --agent agents | No | Yes | 2026-07-19 |
| ZCode | code-audit install --agent zcode | No (plugin-scoped) | Yes | 2026-09-10 |
Hook behavior: Blocking means the diff-scoped changed gate is tripped — an invariant rule that declares gating: true (a binary, per-rule flag, independent of severity) blocks the edit from landing (the agent sees the violation and fixes inline). Advisory means violations are reported through the strongest available feedback channel but the edit has already occurred. Cursor's afterFileEdit hook is fire-and-forget with no output consumption. MCP is available everywhere for shell-less use.
Code Auditor's built-in rules fall into two categories:
| Category | Meaning | Examples |
|---|---|---|
| Deterministic | Structural fact — an engineer would act on every finding | single-responsibility (300-line functions), solid/method-complexity (cyclomatic complexity > 20), solid/class-size (40+ method classes), dependency-inversion (concrete imports where an interface exists) |
| Advisory | Heuristic signal — may be wrong depending on domain | sql-injection-risk (AST-level string-pattern matching without type info), missing-org-filter (domain-specific — assumes SaaS tenant isolation), unknown-table (requires user-provided schema), dry/duplicate (token-identical blocks) |
Deterministic rules ship at critical or severe. Advisory rules ship at severe or high. Rules proven near-zero precision on a real corpus are disabled by default (off) — users opt in when the rule matches their domain.
Built-in severity defaults are recalibrated from real-corpus triage. The current defaults reflect measurement on three corpora: this tool's own codebase, Gin, and Excalidraw. Six data-access rules that produced near-zero precision across all three corpora are disabled by default.
Every disabled rule documents what corpus it would be useful on. Users can restore any rule via severityOverrides in .codeauditor.json:
Severity overrides apply globally (before per-directory path profile caps). Setting a rule to "off" removes it from the output entirely.
The sql-injection-risk rule is disabled by default (off) after recalibration. On the self-audit corpus, it produced 0% precision — the analyzer misinterpreted TypeScript pattern-matching code (string constants like 'SELECT', 'FROM', 'WHERE' used for the tool's own SQL detection) as database queries. On the Gin and Excalidraw corpora, precision was also near zero.
When to re-enable it: your project's SQL is constructed via string concatenation or template literals in functions whose sole purpose is query assembly. The rule detects those patterns. For codebases using ORMs or parameterized queries exclusively, the rule produces noise.
To re-enable and block on SQL injection:
With sql-injection-risk: critical (and the rule marked gating), your agent's hook will block edits that introduce AST-level SQL injection patterns.
Every finding is a measurement, not a verdict — but measurements are occasionally wrong. When the agent hits a false positive (the rule is right in general, wrong for this specific code), it can dismiss that one instance rather than work around it:
The <fingerprint> comes from the JSON report (every violation carries a fingerprint field). A written --reason is required, and the dismissal clears exactly one finding — rule + file + symbol — so the same rule still fires everywhere else. Dismissals live in a committed .codeauditor.dismissals.json, reviewable in a diff.
The reason an agent gives for dismissing a finding is the most useful signal for improving the rules. Code Auditor can send dismissed findings to an anonymous feedback service that collects them.
It is off by default and turned on only by an explicit opt-in — the telemetry MCP tool (status / enable / disable), which records the choice in your user config dir. enable needs no arguments: it opts in against the built-in service endpoint (overridable for self-hosting). Opting in generates an anonymous install ID: a random value generated locally, never derived from your machine, user, or project, used only to group submissions by source.
What is sent — the reason (verbatim) plus a structural AST signature (grammar kinds only, built from a node's type — never its text) and a coarse language hint. What is never sent — source code, identifiers, literals, file paths, or anything derived from your code or environment. Sending is best-effort: offline or an unreachable endpoint is silent and never blocks an edit or fails a gate.
Code Auditor indexes every style declaration in your project — CSS, SCSS, Tailwind, inline styles, and CSS-in-JS. The styles analyzer reads global distributions and flags fragmentation that no single-file linter can see.
7 detectors, 10 rule IDs:
| Detector | What it finds |
|---|---|
| Value drift | Near-duplicate color values (delta-E < 2.0) and exact-value outliers where one value dominates |
| Off-scale | Margin/padding/gap/font-size values not on the inferred project scale |
| Undefined class | className values with no matching CSS selector or Tailwind utility |
| Token bypass | Hardcoded values that match a design token but don't reference it |
| Mechanism fragmentation | Same (property, value) delivered via ≥ 3 mechanisms (CSS, inline, Tailwind) |
| Declaration-set similarity | Two CSS rule blocks with > 90% identical declarations |
| Z-index sprawl | Project-wide z-index inventory — too many distinct values or orphan singletons |
The analyzer reads from a project-wide SQLite index, so scoped runs (changed files only) still compare against the full project baseline. A fresh #273828 drift color in a scoped run is caught against the full corpus of #1e2328 values.
Style invariant rules:
Style search operators — search by property, value, mechanism, or token:
The React analyzer also gains raw-element detection: if your project has a Button wrapper, raw <button> usages outside Button's definition become severe findings.
MIT