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Coherence
Pricing
- Model
- Free
Summary
AI coding assistants write code faster than your documentation, tests, and ADRs can keep up — and the drift is invisible until someone opens a stale doc in production. Coherence is a git-native consistency checker that runs after the agent finishes and tells you what broke.
Coherence scans the links between code, docs, architectural decision records, tests, metrics, generated files, and API endpoints — and flags where those links have snapped. It runs locally, deterministically, with no external API calls by default, which means it fits inside a pre-commit hook or CI pipeline without sending your codebase anywhere. The checks are rule-based, not LLM-driven, so results are repeatable run-to-run. Where it breaks: Coherence detects drift but does not fix it, so the remediation loop is still manual. Teams with loosely structured repos get limited signal until they invest time defining what relationships Coherence should track.
Bottom line: Pick this for any codebase where Copilot or Cursor is touching files daily and you need a deterministic gate to catch stale docs and orphaned tests before they merge — but plan for a manual triage step, because Coherence flags the problem and stops there.
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Pros
Sign in to edit- Deterministic, no-LLM-call checks by default, so CI gates run at consistent speed and cost without per-execution API spend bleeding into your infrastructure bill.
- Runs fully locally with a self-hosted option, which means your source code never leaves the machine during a standard scan — relevant for teams under compliance constraints that prohibit sending code to third-party services.
- Git-native integration supports pre-commit hooks, so drift between a changed implementation file and its paired doc or test surfaces before the commit lands rather than after a reviewer catches it in review.
- Tracks relationships across multiple artifact types — docs, ADRs, tests, generated files, metrics, API endpoints — in a single pass, so teams avoid writing separate linting scripts for each category of consistency problem.
- Open-source with no commercial tier, so there is no feature wall that forces a pricing conversation before you can wire it into a production pipeline.
Cons
Sign in to edit- Coherence only detects drift — it does not suggest or apply a fix. Every flagged inconsistency requires a manual triage and repair step, so in high-velocity repos where an AI agent is committing dozens of changes per day, the volume of flags can outpace the team's capacity to act on them.
- The consistency checks are only as good as the ontology you define upfront. In a repository where file relationships have never been formally mapped, the initial configuration work is non-trivial, and the tool produces no signal on relationships it does not know about — meaning teams get a false sense of coverage before that mapping is complete.
- There is no API surface and no programmatic output format described in the scraped source beyond CLI use, which means teams that want to feed drift results into a dashboard, ticketing system, or custom remediation workflow have to build that integration themselves from CLI output parsing.
- Teams that need AI-assisted remediation alongside detection — where the tool not only flags that a doc is stale but also drafts the update — will hit the ceiling of what Coherence does and move to a heavier agentic code-review tool that closes the loop rather than opening a ticket.
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About
- Platforms
- Linux, macOS, Windows (via Go binary)
- API Available
- No
- Self-Hosted
- Yes
- Last Updated
- 2026-06-09T08:20:50.688Z
Best For
Who it's for
- Teams using GitHub Copilot, Cursor, or Claude Code in active codebases
- Repositories with AI agents making frequent code changes
- CI/CD pipelines requiring deterministic consistency checks without external LLM calls
- Projects with tightly coupled documentation, tests, and code artifacts
What it does well
- Catching documentation drift when AI agents modify code
- Detecting orphaned tests after refactoring or code generation
- Verifying API endpoint definitions match implementation
- Ensuring generated artifacts stay in sync with source files
- Pre-commit review of repository consistency in AI-accelerated workflows
Integrations
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Frequently Asked Questions
- Is Coherence free?
- Yes — Coherence is fully free to use. There is no paid tier.
- Is Coherence open source?
- Yes. Coherence is open source.
- Can I self-host Coherence?
- Yes. Coherence supports self-hosting on your own infrastructure.
- What platforms does Coherence support?
- Coherence is available on: Linux, macOS, Windows (via Go binary).
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Curated lists that include this category
Coherence is an open-source, Git-native drift detector built for repositories where AI coding tools are making frequent changes. The core workflow is a consistency scan: you define relationships between files — docs tied to code modules, tests tied to implementations, generated artifacts tied to source files, API endpoint definitions tied to route handlers — and Coherence checks whether those relationships still hold after each change. It runs locally as a CLI tool, hooks into pre-commit checks or CI pipelines, and the vendor states that deterministic checks do not send code to any external service.
The differentiating design choice is the absence of an LLM in the default check path. Where most drift-detection approaches call out to a model to reason about whether two files are still in sync, Coherence uses rule-based checks defined in an ontology file. That makes results identical on every run and removes the per-call cost and latency that would make a CI gate impractical. The docs describe an optional LLM pass for cases where rule-based checks are insufficient, but it is disabled by default.
Coherence fits tightest in repositories with tightly coupled artifact types — a Go or Python service with ADRs, generated protobuf files, endpoint specs, and test coverage that all need to track each other — used by teams running GitHub Copilot, Cursor, or Claude Code at speed. It does not fit well in loosely structured repositories where the relationships between files have not been formally defined, because the tool can only check links you have told it to watch. Coherence also makes no attempt to remediate drift — it flags, stops, and hands the repair back to you.