loq

An electric fence for LLMs (and humans too). Written in Rust, loq enforces file line limits: fast, zero-config, and language agnostic.

Quickstart

# With uv (recommended)
uv tool install loq

# With pip
pip install loq

# With cargo
cargo install loq

loq                                # Check current directory (500 line default)
loq check src/ lib/                # Check specific paths
git diff --name-only | loq check - # Check files from stdin

Why loq?

• Hard limits on file size to prevent context rot
• One metric: line counts (wc -l style)
• No parsers, no plugins, no config required
• LLM-friendly minimal output and fast Rust core

LLM-friendly, token-efficient output:

✖  1_427 > 500   src/components/Dashboard.tsx
✖    892 > 500   src/utils/helpers.py
2 violations (14ms)

Use loq -v for more context:

✖  1_427 > 500   src/components/Dashboard.tsx
                  └─ rule: max-lines=500 (match: **/*.tsx)

Configuration

loq works zero-config. Run loq init to customize:

default_max_lines = 500       # files not matching any rule
respect_gitignore = true      # skip .gitignore'd files
exclude = [".git/**", "**/generated/**", "*.lock"]

[[rules]]                     # last match wins, ** matches any path
path = "**/*.tsx"
max_lines = 300

Add fix_guidance in loq.toml to include project-specific instructions with each violation when piping output to an LLM:

fix_guidance = "Split large files: helpers → src/utils/, types → src/types/"

Managing legacy files

Existing large files? Baseline them and ratchet down over time:

loq init       # Create loq.toml first
loq baseline   # Add rules for files over the limit

Run periodically. It tightens limits as files shrink, removes rules once files are under the threshold, and ignores files that grew. Files cannot be rebaselined to a higher limit unless you pass --allow-growth. Use --threshold 300 to set a custom limit.

Need to ship while files are still too big? Accept defeat creates or updates exact-path rules for the files currently failing checks:

loq accept-defeat                # Use default buffer of 100 lines
loq accept-defeat src/legacy.rs  # Only update for one file
loq accept-defeat --buffer 50    # Add 50 lines above current size

Add as a Pre-commit Hook

repos:
  - repo: https://github.com/jakekaplan/loq
    rev: v0.1.0-alpha.5
    hooks:
      - id: loq

Contributing

Contributions are welcome! See CONTRIBUTING.md for development setup and guidelines.

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License.