[Proposal] Quality Gates - enforce lint/type-check before feature_mark_passing #96

Related Issues

• Addresses Agent skips and passes features without testing #68 (Agent skips features without testing)
• Addresses Can test evidence be saved inside a feature for easier review #69 (Test evidence storage)

Problem

Currently, the agent can call feature_mark_passing without any verification that the code actually works. This leads to:

1. Features marked as "passing" that don't compile - No lint/type-check enforcement
2. No evidence of what was tested - We don't know if the agent actually verified the feature
3. Features stuck in "in_progress" after agent crash - No auto-recovery mechanism
4. No retry logic - If a feature fails, no tracking of failure count or reason

Proposed Solution

I've implemented "Quality Gates" in my fork that addresses all these issues:

1. Auto-detect Linters and Type Checkers

# Automatic detection based on project config files
Linters:    ESLint, Biome, ruff, flake8
Type-check: TypeScript (tsc), Python (mypy)

2. Enforce Quality Checks Before feature_mark_passing

# New MCP tool: feature_verify_quality
# Runs detected linters/type-checkers
# In strict mode, blocks marking if checks fail

3. Store Quality Results as Evidence

New database columns:

• quality_result - JSON with lint/type-check output (addresses Can test evidence be saved inside a feature for easier review #69)
• failure_reason - Why the feature failed
• failure_count - Number of retry attempts

4. Auto-clear Stuck Features

On agent startup, features stuck in in_progress for >1 hour are reset to pending with failure tracking.

Implementation Details

• ~400 lines in new quality_gates.py module
• Small changes to feature_mcp.py (adds feature_verify_quality, feature_report_failure tools)
• New DB columns (auto-migrated by SQLAlchemy)
• Backwards compatible: disabled by default

Configuration

// .autocoder/config.json
{
  "quality_gates": {
    "enabled": true,
    "strict_mode": true,  // Block marking if checks fail
    "checks": {
      "lint": true,
      "type_check": true
    }
  }
}

Questions for Maintainers

1. Would you be interested in this feature?
2. Should strict_mode be the default, or should it just warn?
3. Any concerns about adding DB columns for tracking?

Happy to submit a PR if there's interest. The implementation is already working in my fork.