Syntaxis is read-only by default. Everything else stops, holds, and asks first — patches, shells, branches, commits, pushes, PRs. The pause is the product. The pause is also why you can leave it running while you walk the dog.
Here's the real inbox. Click a row to see what would happen, then press a to approve or d to deny.(This is a sandbox. Nothing real ships. Nothing real breaks.)
Every Syntaxis run walks the same six gates, in the same order. Each one shows you exactly what it's about to do — and what blast radius that has — before you let it through.
Any new branch or checkout after the trust gate. Syntaxis won't touch your working tree until you say so.
Writes the reviewed diff to local files. The first time the agent touches your disk on this run.
Runs your detected lint / typecheck / test scripts in a sandboxed shell. Only the commands you've listed — never an open prompt.
Stages the patch and writes a commit to your local branch. Nothing leaves your machine yet — just the working tree settles.
Pushes the local branch up through the GitHub App. The first moment something leaves your laptop.
Opens the PR through syntaxis-bot[bot], attributed to you, transitions the Project item to review.
The agents are identical. The difference is whether the side-effect steps pause and ask. Read both timelines top-to-bottom. We'll wait.
The whole product is built on four small rules. If any of them break, that's a bug — file it and we'll fix it before we ship anything else.
Every pending side-effect — local or remote — lands in the same approval inbox. There is no second pile, no slack thread, no email digest. j, k, a, d, o, esc. That's the whole interface.
If a queued action sits for more than 24 hours, Syntaxis discards it and re-runs the upstream step. No accidental late approvals. No mystery branches showing up on Monday.
Every repo starts in read-only mode. You explicitly flip the trust toggle on each one. Off means off — the agent can read, plan, and propose, but the inbox refuses to even accept side-effect entries.
Each approved action is logged with the commit hash, the diff, the command line, the timestamp, and the human who approved it. Three keypresses to revert any single approval.
The six gates are the floor, not the ceiling. A small yaml file in your repo decides which gates can auto-approve themselves, which require a second human, and which never run at all.
Drop a .syntaxis/rules.yaml next to your CODEOWNERS. Syntaxis reads it on each run, applies the overrides, and shows you the diff against the defaults so you can audit your own policy.
The inbox is keyboard-first because reviewing diffs is a left-hand-on-keyboard activity. You learn it in one queue and you never touch the mouse again.
Read these five, then read the contract again, then turn trust on for one small repo. That's the right order.
.syntaxis/rules.yaml is for. Common choices: auto-approve branch and commit (they're reversible and boring), keep patch, push, and pr manual. On Team, the rules file lives in the repo so the whole org sees the same policy.Install the desktop client. Flip the trust toggle on one repo. Let it draft a PR while you go grab a coffee. The inbox will be waiting.