pre-commit

pre-commit is a framework for managing and running git hooks.

Define a .pre-commit-config.yaml in your repo and it will automatically run linters, formatters, and checks before every commit — across any programming language.

Consistency is key: the same checks run locally for every developer and in CI, with no manual setup beyond installing the hooks once (pre-commit install). It creates value because it catches issues as easrly as possible: broken tests or missing commas are caugh before they ever hit a review or pipeline.

Why I like it

pre-commit is a Python-native platform, and since I'm very familiar with Python it's a natural fit for me. It's also a genuinely mature project: 117 releases, 138 contributors, and millions of users.

I use it as a general platform to run all sorts of checks and formatters, not just the obvious linting suspects.

Teaching AI agents to use it

Besides that it is helpful for myself, I also found out that it is very helpful for my coding agents. I explicitly prevent them from hand-formatting files or trying to fix every linter warning themselves. Letting pre-commit's formatters and autofixers handle that instead saves a lot of tokens, and it's faster and more deterministic than an agent guessing at style. That's why I make a point of teaching my AI coding agents to use pre-commit too.

pre-commit in a CI pipeline

Because pre-commit comes with so many good checks out of the box, it makes sense to add these checks also to your CI pipleline. We wouldn't ever want a broken .yml or .json file to be merged into our production code.

But, then why do we run these checks again after they should already have been run before every commmit? Because, we can't guarantee that these checks have passed for each commit. Another developer might not have run pre-commit install locally. Or maybe I was doing a quick commit directly via Github's web vscode editor (this is a super cool feature btw, just press . on the keyboard from any repo and you will open it in a web-version of vscode).

What's next

There's a Rust rewrite of pre-commit in the works: prek. I'm curious to see if it turns into the next uv or ty for this space, speeding up and improving my workflow the same way those did for Python tooling.