Pawl

Pawl is a ratchet gate for agent coding work. A change passes only if no passing test now fails, no test disappears or gets skipped, and the gate itself stays untouched.

Known failures are allowed—and can only go down. Pawl runs the suite in two orders, records the baseline, and gives agents the same answer locally and in CI.

Install it with pip install pawl-gate, initialize a repo with pawl init --github, and make the Pawl check required. Hooks support Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, and Hermes.

In Danny's reported corpus of 21 agent cheats and 8 clean changes, Pawl caught 20 cheats and blocked none of the clean changes. That result is reported project evidence, not a universal guarantee.