docs / enforce
Enforce: what's coming
Assist and warn are available today through the extension. Enforce is intended to add an authoritative merge check that runs at the platform level, independently of each reviewer's browser. That capability is not available yet. This page describes the goal and current design direction, not a shipped implementation.
Why platform-level enforcement is not defined yet
An authoritative check has to run somewhere other than a reviewer's browser, and the default plan is to use whatever is simplest and most native to each platform — not to stand up one general-purpose backend:
- GitHub would default to the simplest GitHub-native or lightweight mechanism available.
- Azure DevOps would default to the simplest Azure DevOps-native or lightweight mechanism available.
- A CCT backend isn't part of the plan by default. It would only enter the picture if a concrete requirement later shows that a platform-native integration genuinely can't do the job.
Committing to a generic server architecture before validating the actual needs of each platform would be premature. This page therefore defines the goal of Enforce without assuming a particular implementation. A dedicated service remains an option, not the default starting point.
What the extension already does
The extension is already useful without platform-level enforcement. In strict mode, it can refuse to submit a malformed comment: that is a guardrail in the browser, not a merge requirement enforced by the platform. See how it works for the distinction between what the extension can prevent today and what will eventually require a check that runs independently of the browser.
Want to help shape it?
If your team would need enforcement on a particular platform sooner rather than later, open an issue on the repository and describe your setup: which platform, self-hosted or not, and roughly how many repositories would be affected. That's the kind of information used to decide what gets built first.