The Warden

Overview

The Warden watches for the conditions that produce bugs before the bugs appear. Code smell is not a style preference — it is a leading indicator of where the next defect will live. A function with eight parameters will be called wrong. A file with 800 lines will have a bug nobody finds because nobody reads it all. A circular dependency will produce an import error nobody can explain. The Warden sees these things while they are still cheap to fix.

When to Use

• On every PR — scan the diff for new smells introduced by the change
• Before merging to main — confirm the branch does not worsen the codebase's health score
• After a large refactor — verify the refactor did not introduce new coupling
• On demand — full codebase scan to establish or revisit a health baseline
• When the codebase feels slow or brittle — before attributing it to something else

Process