Introduction

Airlock is an open-source, local-first agentic CI system that validates code before it reaches your team. It sits between your local repo and the remote, intercepting git push to run workflows — lint, test, review, describe — and producing a Push Request for human approval before anything goes upstream.

The Bottleneck Has Moved

AI coding agents — Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot, Codex — now write features, refactor systems, and generate tests. The bottleneck is no longer writing code. It's validating it.

And our tools haven't caught up. CI pipelines run after you push. Code review happens after a PR is opened. The entire quality infrastructure of modern development lives in the outer loop — after code leaves your machine, after it's already visible to the team.

In the inner loop — where you're actually working — you're on your own. Reading diffs manually, testing changes by hand, hoping the agent didn't hallucinate a dependency.

The Push Request

Think of an airlock — the chamber in a spacecraft between the inside and the void. Before anything goes out, you verify it's safe.

Whenever you push a code change, it first enters Airlock where it gets validated and cleaned up. You review everything in a Push Request: summary, code review comments, test results, suggested fixes. When you're satisfied, approve — the code pushes to the remote and a clean, well-documented pull request appears.

INPUT (raw AI-generated code)           OUTPUT (clean, reviewable PR)
──────────────────────────              ──────────────────────────────
❌ Lint errors                       →  ✅ All lints pass
❌ No tests for new code             →  ✅ Tests generated and passing
❌ No documentation                  →  ✅ Functions documented
❌ No PR description                 →  ✅ Rich summary with walkthrough
❌ Unused imports, dead code         →  ✅ Clean, minimal code
❌ Hardcoded secrets                 →  ✅ Flagged for review

Everything runs locally — no cloud dependency, no separate LLM bills, no account required.

For the full story behind Airlock, read Introducing Airlock.

Key Concepts

• Push Requests — The unit of review. Contains a summary, code review comments, test results, and patches.
• Workflows — Declarative YAML files that define what runs on each push.
• Freeze — A dividing line in your workflow between auto-fixable changes and locked review.
• Artifacts — Content, comments, and patches produced by workflow steps.

Next Steps

• Getting Started — Install Airlock and run your first push in under five minutes
• How It Works — Understand the architecture: CLI, daemon, gate repos, and desktop app