Guardsman: The AI Coding Tool That Admits What It Cannot Measure

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Developer Hedi Manai has built Guardsman, a small open-source AI coding skill for Claude Code, Codex, and Cursor, designed around risk management rather than code-size reduction. Unlike most AI coding tools that lead with unverified benchmark claims, Guardsman's README openly states that results from its benchmarking protocol are not yet available. The tool assigns one of four risk tiers to a task before any code is written, with higher tiers requiring progressively stricter test coverage, especially for code touching payments, authentication, or user data. It also reads a repository's existing conventions through a deterministic script and follows a fixed decision ladder to avoid unnecessary code before writing anything new. The project has attracted attention less for its feature set and more for its transparent refusal to fabricate performance numbers in a space where overclaiming is routine.

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