dotpals is a desktop app that shows what a coding agent actually did. It catches cases where test output was read directly and taken as a pass, and it also provides an MCP server that can be asked from any AI tool. The October 27, 2026 commit 084c9c9 merged PR #45 submitted by agusumri, adding support for `.dotpals.json` so that writing the rules once per project makes every agent work under those criteria.
There are five kinds of rules: paths that must not be touched (mustNotTouch), paths that may be touched (onlyTouch), commands that must pass (mustPass), a ban on new dependencies (noNewDependencies), and the before-edit intervention mode (beforeEdit: ask·tell·off). When a request ends, the tools and commands it used and the changes git sees are compared against the rules, and violations are displayed together on the agent card, on the "Ready to merge?" screen, and in the MCP tool check_my_work. Paths can use the `*`, `**`, `?` wildcards, and the lookup climbs from the session folder up to the repository root, with the nearest file winning, so different rules can be set for each package in a monorepo. dotpals only reads this file and never writes to it.
This commit added 494 lines and deleted 8 lines across 8 files. bridge/rules.js, which handles rule interpretation and checking, came in as 194 new lines, and test/rules.test.js at 170 lines and test/guard.test.js at 45 lines were added along with it. README gained a single line, the entry "Project rules for every agent".
The limitations are clear. mustPass commands are not executed by dotpals itself; they are only compared (one line, within 200 characters, no backticks), and whether they actually pass still depends on the output of whoever ran them. Also, the behavior of stopping before a modification is, according to the README, documented only for Claude Code, and the other agents get only after-the-fact checks once the request has ended. There are no figures on rule-application accuracy or detection rate, and no repository license or star count in the given information. Even so, the point that project rules stay bound to the project no matter which agent you switch to is practical, and together with the feature that re-reads test results, it is a change worth reviewing.