Git hooks are your best defense against AI-generated mess

Ahnii! Git hooks have been around forever. Pre-commit linting, pre-push test suites, commit message formatting. Useful but optional. Most developers set them up once and forget about them. With AI agents writing and committing code, hooks aren't optional anymore. They're the gate between an agent's output and your repository. This post covers why hooks matter more now than ever and what to enforce. The Problem Hooks Solve An AI agent can generate syntactically correct code that passes its own review and still violate your project's standards. Wrong import style. Missing type annotations. A function with cognitive complexity over your threshold. Tests that pass but don't cover the edge case your team cares about. Without hooks, that code lands in your repo. You catch it in code review, or worse, you don't. A pre-commit hook catches it before the commit exists. The agent gets the failure, adjusts, and tries again. No human review needed for mechanical violations. What to Enforce Start wi