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ProofRun – a local verification receipt for AI coding agents

ProofRun, a new open-source tool released at version 0.2.0, provides cryptographic verification receipts for AI coding agents by binding test results to the exact code state, with statuses of PASS, FAIL, STALE, or NOT RUN. The tool, written by Claude Code under human direction and adversarially reviewed, runs real subprocesses without any LLM calls, operates fully offline, and compares argument arrays rather than strings. It addresses the problem of AI agents claiming tests pass without actually running them, and its own command comparison was found and fixed after a security review.

read5 min views1 publishedAug 16, 2026
ProofRun – a local verification receipt for AI coding agents
Image: Michielbdejong (auto-discovered)

ProofRun doesn't judge whether your code is correct. It proves — cryptographically, not by asking nicely — which checks actually ran against the exact code you have right now.

An AI coding agent says "all tests pass." Is that true?

Maybe. It was true the last time the agent actually ran the tests. But that might have been three edits ago. The agent might not even remember running them — it might just be inferring "the change looks right, tests probably still pass." From the words alone, you have no way to tell "I ran it and it passed" apart from "I'm pretty sure it would pass."

ProofRun closes that gap. Not by making the agent more honest — by making the claim itself checkable.

$ proofrun run test -- pytest
...
test: pass (exit 0, 1841ms)

$ proofrun status
test                 PASS    (exit 0, 1841ms)


$ proofrun status
test                 STALE   (last run: pass, exit 0 — code changed since)

Every check result is bound to a fingerprint of your exact code state: the git commit, plus a hash of everything uncommitted — staged or not, tracked or not. Change a single byte, and the result flips to STALE

automatically. Nobody has to remember to ask "does this PASS still count?"

curl -L https://github.com/yebiguo/proofrun/releases/download/v0.2.0/proofrun_linux_amd64.tar.gz | tar xz

Or build from source:

go install github.com/yebiguo/proofrun/cmd/proofrun@latest
proofrun init                      # writes .proofrun.yml
proofrun run test -- pytest        # runs pytest for real, binds the result
proofrun status --strict           # non-zero exit if anything isn't PASS

No LLM calls, anywhere. ProofRun doesn't use AI to verify AI. It starts a real subprocess and reads its real exit code — that's the entire mechanism.Four statuses, never a guess.PASS

,FAIL

,STALE

,NOT RUN

— each one comes from an observed execution, or the documented absence of one. There's no fifth "probably fine."Fully offline. Zero network calls, zero telemetry, zero accounts.Argv-exact, not string-matched. A check declared aspytest -k "foo bar"

can't be satisfied by a command that merely looks similar once flattened to text — ProofRun compares real argument arrays, not strings.

It does not parse test output, does not judge code quality, and does not auto-fix anything. See AGENTS.md for the complete boundary.

ProofRun was written by an AI coding agent (Claude Code) under human direction, then went through several rounds of independent, read-only adversarial review before the first release. That review found that ProofRun's own command comparison could be tricked: a misquoted shell argument made a check silently run zero tests and still report PASS

. Full repro, the exact fix, and why a simple patch wasn't enough → docs/case-study.md.

Every fix was verified against a real reproduction before being accepted — not just reviewed for plausibility. A tool built to hold AI agents accountable has no business existing if it can't survive that same scrutiny applied to itself.

proofrun init                      # generate .proofrun.yml
proofrun run <check-name> -- <cmd> # run <cmd> for real, bind exit code + duration to current git state
proofrun run-all [--only <name>]   # run every declared check, saving a result after each one
proofrun status [--strict]         # PASS / FAIL / STALE / NOT RUN per check; --strict exits non-zero if a required check isn't PASS
proofrun report [--json]           # full report, human- or machine-readable
checks:
  test:
    command: [pytest]
    required: true
  build:
    command: [npm, run, build]
    required: true
  lint:
    command: [ruff, check, .]
    required: false

command

is an argv list, not a shell string — ProofRun never goes through a shell, and comparing what actually ran against what's declared has to be exact, element for element. required: true

is what makes a check block status --strict

, which is what you'd wire into a pre-commit hook or CI gate.

Every result is bound to your current git HEAD

plus a SHA-256 hash of git diff HEAD

combined with the contents of any untracked, non-ignored files. proofrun status

recomputes that fingerprint every time and compares it against what's stored locally — any mismatch, down to a single changed space or one new file, reports STALE

.

on: pull_request
permissions:
  contents: read
jobs:
  verify:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: yebiguo/proofrun@v1

This does its own checkout of the exact PR head commit — it never trusts whatever the calling workflow already checked out, so a pull_request

trigger can't silently hand it GitHub's synthetic merge-preview commit instead. It then clears out any receipt.json

that came in on the PR branch, downloads a checksum-verified proofrun

binary, and runs proofrun run-all

for real before gating on proofrun status --strict

. Nothing about a receipt checked into the PR branch is ever trusted — every result the gate sees was produced by this run.

Known limitation: this does not protect .proofrun.yml

itself from being weakened by the same PR that changes the code — a PR could loosen or remove a check's command and the Action would faithfully re-run the weaker version. It warns (via a build annotation) when .proofrun.yml

differs from the PR's base branch, but it does not block on that; review that diff the same way you'd review any other part of the change.

v0.3— structured output support for common test runners (pytest, Jest, JUnit)- Signed, tamper-evident receipts are on the radar, not yet designed

  • Protecting .proofrun.yml

itself from being weakened within the same PR that changes the code (currently only warned about, not blocked — see "Known limitation" above)

Issues and PRs welcome. This is a young, pre-1.0 project with a narrow, deliberate scope — see AGENTS.md before proposing anything that touches STALE detection or the receipt schema; those are the parts this project can least afford to get wrong.

MIT

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