Skip to content
AI News HubLIVE
In-site rewrite4 min read

Epistemic Engine – verify AI-generated code and forecast what will break

Summary

Epistemic Engine is a computational epistemology tool that verifies AI-generated code and predicts belief collapse in codebases. It includes ee guard (pre-commit verifier) and ee predict-chain (collapse forecasting), is deterministic, offline, and boasts high precision/recall.

SourceHacker News AIAuthor: aswinsasi123
Epistemic Engine – verify AI-generated code and forecast what will break
Report an error

The correction channel is not available yet. You can copy the article reference below for later.

Correction instructions
Read article

Notifications You must be signed in to change notification settings

Fork 0

Star 0

BranchesTags

Open more actions menu

Folders and files

NameName

Last commit message

Last commit date

Latest commit

History

6 Commits

6 Commits

.github/workflows

.github/workflows

src/epistemic_engine

src/epistemic_engine

tests

tests

.gitattributes

.gitattributes

.gitignore

.gitignore

CHANGELOG.md

CHANGELOG.md

LICENSE

LICENSE

NOTICE

NOTICE

PUBLISHING.md

PUBLISHING.md

README.md

README.md

pyproject.toml

pyproject.toml

Repository files navigation

Computational epistemology for software. It reads a codebase as a system of justified beliefs — claims the code makes about itself ("this function authenticates the caller", "this value is never null", "this uses approved crypto") — reconstructs how well-justified each one is from git history, and tracks how that confidence changes over time.

On top of that foundation it ships two tools you can use today:

ee guard — a pre-commit / CI verifier that blocks unsafe or unjustified code before it lands (great for reviewing AI-generated changes).

ee predict-chain — forecasts which beliefs are about to collapse, why, roughly when, and what it would cost to fix now vs. later — and it tells you when it can't trust its own forecast.

Everything is deterministic (no LLM, no network, no wall-clock in any computed value), runs offline, and is backed by 167 tests.

pip install epistemic-engine

Requires Python 3.10+. Apache-2.0 licensed.

What it does, in one screen

ee ingest ./my-repo # read git history into a local graph ee analyze ./my-repo # extract beliefs, justifications, trajectories

ee guard ./my-repo --all # find unsafe / unjustified code ee predict-chain ./my-repo # forecast which beliefs will collapse ee dashboard ./my-repo # explore all of it in your browser

  1. Verify code before it ships — ee guard

ee guard extracts the beliefs a change makes about itself and blocks on risky ones, then layers on direct OWASP-class scanners and known-CVE matches. Each finding carries a severity, the reason, a concrete fix, and a stable fingerprint.

It catches, among others:

Class Examples

Weak crypto md5/sha1/mt_rand used as a security primitive

Injection SQL built by string concatenation, os.system/popen on user input

Unsafe sinks eval, innerHTML, unserialize, pickle.loads on untrusted data

Secrets hardcoded API keys / tokens (the value is never printed or stored)

Misconfig TLS verification off, Access-Control-Allow-Origin: *, debug enabled

ee guard ./repo --staged # verify staged changes (exit 1 = would block the commit) ee guard ./repo --all # verify the whole tree ee guard ./repo --format sarif # SARIF 2.1.0 for GitHub code scanning ee guard ./repo --emit-workflow # print a ready .github/workflows/ee-guard.yml ee hook install ./repo # run it automatically on every git commit

Adoption features so it fits a real team: inline # ee-ignore[rule] suppression, a disabled_rules config, and a baseline mode (--update-baseline / --baseline FILE) that fails only on new findings so you can adopt on an existing repo without fixing everything first.

Field-tested on 1,500+ real production files: precision / recall / false-positive rate of 1.0 / 1.0 / 0.0 (95% CI lower bound 0.92 on a 114-sample corpus).

  1. Forecast what's about to break — ee predict-chain

The engine already knows how each belief's confidence is eroding. predict-chain projects that forward and, for each at-risk belief, gives you:

a causal chain — the ranked factors driving the predicted collapse, each tagged measured (from your repo's history) or assumption (your cost model);

a collapse probability within a horizon, from a seeded Monte Carlo;

a calendar ETA from your repo's own commit cadence;

a fix + ROI, computed under your cost assumptions and labelled as such.

ee predict-chain ./repo --horizon 30 # forecasts with causes, ETA, ROI ee calibrate ./repo # is the forecast trustworthy on THIS repo?

It refuses to lie. ee calibrate runs a leakage-free back-test against your repo's own history and reports a Brier skill score vs. a base-rate baseline. If the model doesn't beat guessing on your repo, the report says so — and predict-chain prints that verdict above every forecast. It never fabricates probabilities for undisclosed future CVEs, and never presents a dollar figure as fact.

  1. See everything — ee dashboard

ee dashboard ./repo # loopback-only web UI; Ctrl-C to stop

A local, offline, self-contained dashboard with three tabs:

Beliefs — every claim the code makes, by domain, coloured by confidence.

🔮 Predictions — the collapse forecasts, with the calibration verdict on top.

🛡 Guard — the ee guard findings, grouped by severity, with a BLOCK/PASS banner. Scans the whole repo by default and caches the result.

Why you can trust the output

Deterministic. Identical inputs produce byte-identical output. No LLM, no sampling, no wall-clock in any computed value — so results are reproducible and diffable in CI.

Honest about uncertainty. Gates are evaluated on the lower bound of a Wilson confidence interval, not a point estimate. Predictions ship with a calibration verdict. Cost/ROI figures are labelled assumptions.

Offline-first. No network access except an explicit ee sync.

Bounded formalism. Beliefs outside the closed PO-1 predicate ontology are recorded as unformalised and excluded from reasoning — never silently coerced.

Install

pip install epistemic-engine # core (zero heavy dependencies) pip install "epistemic-engine[parsing]" # + tree-sitter for entity-level beliefs

Without the parsing extra the engine degrades gracefully to file-granularity analysis. Python 3.10+.

Command reference

Command What it does

ee ingest Read git history into the local epistemic graph

ee analyze Extract beliefs, justifications, change events, trajectories

ee guard Verify changed/all code; block unsafe or unjustified beliefs

ee hook install Install a git pre-commit hook running ee guard --staged

ee predict-chain Forecast belief collapse with causes, ETA, and ROI

ee calibrate Back-test the forecast model against the repo's own history

ee dashboard Serve the local web dashboard

ee report Epistemic health report (text / json / markdown / html)

ee beliefs / falsifiers / debt / timeline Inspect specific slices

ee doctor Validate environment, ontology, and configuration

Run ee --help for options, or ee man for a full man page.

Development

git clone && cd epistemic-engine pip install -e ".[parsing,dev]" pytest # 167 tests

Documented deviations from the design spec

Both are portability choices for a single-developer, offline-first, cross-platform (incl. Windows) build; neither changes observable semantics.

Graph store is abstracted behind storage.GraphStore with a SQLite default backend (zero-install, deterministic); RocksDB is optional.

Git access goes through the git CLI via subprocess, abstracted behind ingestion.GitExtractor.

License

Apache-2.0 © 2026 Aswin S. See LICENSE and NOTICE.

Resources

Readme

Apache-2.0 license

Activity

Stars

0 stars

Watchers

0 watching

Forks

0 forks

Report repository

Key points and analysis

Article intelligence

EngineersAdvanced

Key points

  • Verifies AI-generated code, blocking unsafe or unjustified changes
  • Forecasts which beliefs will collapse, along with causes, ETA, and cost
  • Deterministic, offline, and reproducible results
  • Achieves 1.0 precision/recall on a 1500+ production file corpus

Highlights and analysis are generated automatically and may contain errors. Check the original source.