what is colony fr?

Colony is a tool that checks AI-generated code before you trust it. The idea is simple: instead of hoping the code an AI assistant wrote is correct, you run it through a set of checks that catch problems early, before they cause trouble later. The project is built around what it calls a 4-phase pattern. Any coding task moves through four stages in order: Define, Design, Build, and Check. Each stage has its own smaller checks, called gates, and the idea is that nothing moves forward until the checks for that stage pass. Colony includes a command line tool you install with pip. You give it a specification file, written as a markdown table describing what the code is supposed to do, along with the code file itself, and it runs four verification gates against that code. Those gates check whether the code stays within the size and limits you specified, whether its complexity is reasonable, whether it handles errors and edge cases, and whether everything from the specification actually made it into the finished code. The tool then produces a report showing the results. The project also includes a benchmark folder that compares Colony against two other tools, Ponytail and CrewAI, across five coding tasks, using included runner scripts. For teams that want to use the approach without the CLI, the README explains that a file called OVERLAY.md can be copied into a project as AGENTS.md, CLAUDE.md, or .cursorrules to bring the same checking method into other AI coding tools. Colony is released under the MIT license, so it can be used, copied, and modified freely, including for commercial purposes.