Costrict

Strict by design, and it shows in the diffs it refuses to wave through. It slotted into my workflow without ceremony and kept the feedback terse. A faster local mode would help on big repositories, but the standards it enforces are worth the wait.

It says no when the code is bad. That alone puts it ahead of most. Set it up, fed it a branch, got back real objections rather than praise. Quality first is not marketing here, it is the behaviour.

The thesis here is that quality should come before speed, and an enterprise coding assistant should refuse to ship slop even when asked nicely. In practice that meant it flagged weak tests and questionable patterns rather than rubber-stamping my diff, which is exactly the discipline most tools lack. I ran it against a mid-sized service and the review comments were specific and mostly correct, though a couple were pedantic in ways a senior engineer would wave off. The open questions for me are about how the rules are configured per team, and how it handles a legacy codebase where the existing style is already inconsistent. As a strict pair that values correctness over agreeableness, it is one of the more grown-up tools in this space.

An AI coder that is deliberately strict is a refreshing inversion of the usual eager-to-please assistant. It pushed back on a sloppy change of mine, which stung and then helped. Enterprise framing aside, the quality gates are the point and they hold.

I appreciate a coding assistant that treats quality and safety as defaults rather than upsells. It caught an unsanitised input in a sample I fed it, which earned my attention. I would still like a written account of what leaves the building when it reviews private code.