TRtruehill·May 20, 2026Submission
Tears – Tiered Enforcement, Authorship Review System
4 points · Open discussionThillel
tears
Python2026–2026
Thillel / tears
tears
Tiered Enforcement, Authorship Review System. Files declare trust levels via @tear headers. AI edits auto-demote to untrusted. Humans attest review quality by restoring the tier before committing. CI enforces import boundaries between trust tiers. No tears, no tiers.
2Distinct people
3Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
16GitHub stars
What to know before exploring
What it is
Tiered Enforcement, Authorship Review System. Files declare trust levels via @tear headers. AI edits auto-demote to untrusted. Humans attest review quality by restoring the tier before committing. CI enforces import boundaries between trust tiers. No tears, no tiers.
GitHub
Where it is used
No documented product use has been verified yet.
What people are saying
No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.
No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.
Also in these discussions
No other repository is repeatedly linked in the same discussions.
This week on Hacker News
Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 3:56:07 PM UTC.
No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.
Mentions over time
HN mentions by 3-hour interval3 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2026-05-19 12:07:53 UTC to 2026-05-20 20:56:36 UTC.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| May 19, 12:00 | 2026-05-19 12:00:00 UTC | 2026-05-19 15:00:00 UTC | 1 | 1 | 0 |
| May 19, 15:00 | 2026-05-19 15:00:00 UTC | 2026-05-19 18:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| May 19, 18:00 | 2026-05-19 18:00:00 UTC | 2026-05-19 21:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| May 19, 21:00 | 2026-05-19 21:00:00 UTC | 2026-05-20 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| May 20, 00:00 | 2026-05-20 00:00:00 UTC | 2026-05-20 03:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| May 20, 03:00 | 2026-05-20 03:00:00 UTC | 2026-05-20 06:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| May 20, 06:00 | 2026-05-20 06:00:00 UTC | 2026-05-20 09:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| May 20, 09:00 | 2026-05-20 09:00:00 UTC | 2026-05-20 12:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| May 20, 12:00 | 2026-05-20 12:00:00 UTC | 2026-05-20 15:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| May 20, 15:00 | 2026-05-20 15:00:00 UTC | 2026-05-20 18:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| May 20, 18:00 | 2026-05-20 18:00:00 UTC | 2026-05-20 21:00:00 UTC | 1 | 1 | 0 |
What Hacker News says
3 sourcesI think there are two different problems that get mixed together here:
1. Did the engineer personally understand this change?
2. Is this change allowed to affect critical parts of the system?
The first one is hard to enforce mechanically. You can require design docs, tests, PR explanations, walkthroughs, etc., but a determined person can route all of that through an LLM too.
The second one is more enforceable, and I think it matters a lot in the AI-coding world.
Not all code deserves the same review posture. A dashboard, script, prototype, migration helper, etc. should be able to move fast. But auth, billing, security-sensitive logic, and core business rules should not quietly depend on code that was “just agent output” or barely reviewed.
The pattern I’ve been experimenting with is explicit trust/review tiers in the codebase:
- low-risk
Read the rest
/ vibe-coded code can exist
- agent-touched files get marked as lower-trust
- humans can restore trust after review
- CI enforces that high-trust code cannot import lower-trust code
- critical directories can be required to stay high-trust
This doesn’t prove the engineer understood the code. Nothing really does.
But it does create review memory in the repo. If a file was touched by an agent, that state is visible in the diff. If someone promotes it back to a trusted tier, that promotion is also visible in the diff, and reviewers can ask “did you actually read this?”
I ended up building a small OSS tool around this idea called Tears: https://github.com/Thillel/tears
The slogan is a bit tongue-in-cheek, but it captures the point: vibe-code responsibly.
Tears – vibe code responsibly with tiered trust levels
2 points · Open discussion