Prelint bets AI code needs a decision ledger: PH #1 with 548 votes, $1 per review

Prelint is a decision-ledger product-review tool: teams connect GitHub or GitLab, and every pull request gets a roughly 20-second decision review that flags changes contradicting earlier choices — billing logic, compliance, dependencies, domain language, scope — then records the decision with who made it, when, and whether an AI or a human decided. Pricing is $1 per completed review with prepaid credits; open-source projects are free.

Teams shipping AI-written code will pay for a decision ledger that checks every pull request against specs and past decisions, catching product drift the day it appears.

The founding moment came when an AI agent ignored the team's event-driven architecture and built a feature by bypassing it: the code worked and passed review, but was not what the team wanted — 'product drift'. Wojtek Szkutnik, previously co-founder and investor at Kalamba Games (2017–2024), and CTO Krzysztof Kulig built Prelint to record and check product decisions; per prelint.com the company began in AI for smart buildings before landing on the decision ledger, and growth lead Irena Pawlowski joined in March 2026.

The 2026-07-29 Product Hunt launch (#1 Product of the Day, 548 upvotes) introduced the ledger model: every pull request gets a short decision review, approved decisions become context agents use on the next task, and contradicting decisions lower confidence so agents ask before building. Company-published research reviewed 56,706 pull requests across 331 open-source repositories, flagging 36.6% of changes when documentation existed versus 13.3% without, and Prelint says teams already running several AI reviewers see about 40% of pre-merge fixes come from its checks.

As of September 2026 Prelint is live at $1 per completed review with $10 free credits, SOC 2 Type 1, per-tenant review sandboxes that are destroyed afterward, US hosting and self-hosted options, and prelint.com reports 40% of code changes on Linux Foundation projects now quote its reviews.

AI agents ship technically sound code that ignores architecture and business rules; no test fails, so only an intent check catches it.

Recording each decision with a source and date turns reviews into an audit trail and into context the team's own agents reuse.

Pricing per completed review with no seats or subscriptions matches how agents actually generate pull requests.

Being a complementary layer rather than a CodeRabbit replacement avoids the crowded 'find the bug' market.

Review intent, not just correctness: when agents write code faster than humans can read it, the constraint is whether changes match decisions, and recording each decision makes drift traceable.

As of 2026-09-06 Prelint is live and usage-priced: $1 per completed review with prepaid credits, free for open source, SOC 2 Type 1, US hosting with zero data retention at the model provider, and optional self-hosted deployment. Its site reports 40% of code changes on Linux Foundation projects now quote a Prelint review. Open questions are whether teams keep documentation sharp enough for the ledger to stay accurate, whether agent-era review becomes a default inside GitHub rather than a paid add-on, and how far the tool moves from the pull-request gate to ticket-stage checks.