Setting up AI features

What lawlint init does, which providers are supported, and where API keys are stored.

Linting is deterministic and offline. Two features are not — the soft-rule AI judge and lawlint learn — and neither does anything until you configure a model.

lawlint init

The walkthrough covers AI-model choice, whether the judge runs on every lint, Markdown handling for stdin, and custom rule directories. It writes .lawlint/config.json, plus an optional starter rules package under .lawlint/rules/.

Hosted providers

The recommended path: better quality, no multi-gigabyte download.

API keys go to a user-level credential file — ~/.lawlint/credentials, mode 0600 — or to the environment. The environment wins. Keys are never written into your project, so .lawlint/config.json is safe to commit.

Once a key and a model are configured, the soft rules run on every lint, including in directories with no project config. --no-ai skips them for a run; "judge": { "enabled": false } turns them off for good.

Before 0.8 the credential file lived at ~/.config/lawlint/credentials. It is still read from there, and the next lawlint init moves it to ~/.lawlint/ and reports the move.

Keeping text on your machine

lawlint has no built-in model. If the document must not leave your machine — privileged material, a client matter under an engagement term that forbids it — run an OpenAI-compatible server yourself and point lawlint at it:

ollama serve && ollama pull qwen3:30b
lawlint init --ai openai:http://localhost:11434/v1#qwen3:30b

That spec needs no API key, and nothing but your own server ever sees the text. Ollama, vLLM, llama.cpp and LM Studio all speak this protocol.

Non-interactive setup

lawlint init --yes                          # accept defaults (hosted)
lawlint init --ai anthropic:claude-haiku-4-5-20251001
lawlint init --ai openai:http://localhost:11434/v1#qwen3:30b  # self-hosted
lawlint init --force                        # overwrite an existing config

What it writes

// .lawlint/config.json — every field optional, camelCase
{
  "ai": {
    "model": "anthropic:claude-haiku-4-5-20251001",
    "features": { "judge": "...", "learn": "..." },
  },
  "judge": { "enabled": false },
  "markdown": false,
  "ruleDirs": [".lawlint/rules"]
}

ai.model is the default for every AI feature; ai.features overrides it per feature. The full schema is in Configuration.

Where config is found

The CLI walks up from the current directory looking for .lawlint/config.json, falling back to the legacy lawlint.config.json at each level. The first directory containing either is the project root, and relative ruleDirs resolve against it.

A config file that exists but does not parse is a configuration error — exit 2 — never a silent skip.