Show HN: Ox – an AI agent that catches tech debt before it's committed
Craig, a former IBM software engineer, created Ox, an AI agent that reviews code changes before they are committed (via CLI or GitHub PRs) to catch and fix technical debt early. Built to adapt to a repository's conventions and learn over time, it aims to prevent the expected surge in tech debt from AI-generated code by offering contextual fixes for authors or reviewers.
Background
"Show HN" is a Hacker News tradition where makers present projects to the technical community for critique. The creator is a former IBM engineer who built developer tools there. "Tech debt" (technical debt) refers to the long-term cost of code shortcuts — it accumulates invisibly and makes future changes harder. The post taps into a live concern: AI coding assistants (Copilot, Cursor, ChatGPT) produce code fast, but often sloppily, accelerating tech debt. Ox is a pre-commit guardrail that learns each codebase's conventions. "Shipilev's curve" is an observation by performance expert Aleksey Shipilëv that clean code ≠ fast code — acknowledging Ox prioritizes maintainability over performance.