- Category
- Developer Tools
- Rank
- No. 2177Tools index
Previous survey · No. 2006 ·
- Pricing
- Open Source
- Type
- TOOL
- Use case
- Software Testing & Quality
- GitHub
- 1 stars
- Latest release
- v0.4.0
- Date
About
Badbox lets a repository encode its own questionable engineering patterns as structural rules under a .badbox/ directory, then checks the codebase against them without using an LLM. It reports where each pattern occurred, who owns it, and how often, leaving the decision on what to do to a developer or coding agent, and it ships no default policies and performs no automatic rewriting.
At a glance
Badbox checks a codebase for structural patterns your team defines and reports where they occur. It is worth trying when a recurring review comment can be turned into a rule you want developers and agents to run consistently.
Good fit
Teams that can identify one recurring code pattern and write a structural check for it.
Consider something else when
Skip it if you expect built-in security policies or automatic fixes. Badbox ships with neither.
Start here
Pick one pattern that has caused review churn. Write a rule and run it against examples that should and should not match. Check that the reported locations give a reviewer enough context to decide what to change.
Cost and requirements
MIT-licensed. The documented setup requires Bun 1.3.14 or newer. Your team supplies and maintains rules in the repository.
Limits to know
The rule format is experimental. A finding shows that your rule matched a structure. Whether the code is wrong still depends on the surrounding behavior.
Sources checked 2026-11-05. Source-based assessment.
Why it made the leaderboard
It gives teams a fast, non-LLM way to flag project-specific bad patterns during agent-driven changes, avoiding the cost and nondeterminism of an LLM-based linter.
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Editorially curated, with community endorsements as a secondary signal. Corrections welcome.