Continuous integration

Gating a pull request on prose, using exit codes honestly.

lawlint is a single static binary with no runtime dependencies and no network access, which makes it cheap to run on every pull request.

Exit codes

Code	Meaning	In CI
`0`	Clean, within limits	Pass
`1`	An error-severity finding, or warnings over `--max-warnings`	Fail the check
`2`	I/O or configuration problem	Fail the build — nothing was linted

Keeping 2 distinct from 1 is the point: a 2 means your setup is broken and the document was never examined. Do not collapse them into “non-zero means bad”.

A GitHub Actions job

name: prose
on: pull_request

jobs:
  lawlint:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v4
      - name: Install lawlint
        run: curl -fsSL https://lawlint.com/install.sh | sh
      - name: Lint changed documents
        run: |
          lawlint --no-update-check --max-warnings 20 docs/**/*.md

--no-update-check skips the once-a-day release check, which has no business running in CI.

Choosing a gate

Advisory — run without --max-warnings so only error-severity findings fail. Everything else is information in the log. Start here.

Budgeted — set --max-warnings to roughly today’s count and ratchet it down. Prevents regression without demanding a cleanup first.

Machine-readable output

lawlint --format json --quiet draft.md > findings.json

--quiet suppresses the pretty report while preserving the exit status. See the JSON output reference for the schema, and key off tier rather than the hard/soft terminology.

Keep the judge out of it

The AI judge sends document text to a model provider and can vary between runs. Neither belongs in a required check. Run the deterministic rules in CI, and leave --judge for the desk.