IntentWeave vs. Other Tools

IntentWeave overlaps with several existing tools on import/dependency rules, but goes further into architecture governance, doc↔code drift, and RAG context for AI coding agents — a combination none of them cover on their own. These pages compare IntentWeave against specific tools your team may already use, so you can decide what to replace and what to keep running alongside it.

In short: for most teams, IntentWeave is more complementary than competing with the tools below. A common setup is dependency-cruiser or ArchUnitTS for layer rules already wired into an existing workflow, Semgrep for security scanning, and IntentWeave for AST/taint rules, behavioral call-graph checks, doc↔code drift, and RAG context — none of which the others cover.

The Comparisons

Tool	Primary focus	Where IntentWeave overlaps	Where IntentWeave goes further
Semgrep	Security vulnerability scanning (SAST), 30+ languages	Custom AST pattern rules	Layer/import rules as a first-class concept, behavioral call-graph rules, doc↔code drift, ADR extraction, RAG context
ArchUnitTS	Architecture rules as unit tests, classic OO metrics	Import/layer boundary rules	AST-level rules with taint tracking, custom graph queries, behavioral call-graph rules, doc↔code drift, ADR extraction, RAG context
dependency-cruiser	Import graph validation & visualization	Import/dependency boundary rules, circular dependency detection	AST-level rules with taint tracking, custom graph queries, behavioral call-graph rules, doc↔code drift, ADR extraction, RAG context

What’s Consistently Outside These Tools’ Scope

A few capabilities show up as an IntentWeave-only column across all three comparisons, because none of these tools were built for them:

• Doc↔code grounding and drift detection — none of the three have any concept of documentation.
• ADR extraction (optional LLM step) — iw index rules-extract drafts a rules.yaml from a written ADR instead of every rule being hand-authored.
• RAG context for AI coding agents — iw index context-pack hands your AI coding agent a token-budgeted, ranked bundle of files, rules, and doc drift for a query.
• Custom graph queries — a cypher rule type runs CypherLite queries directly against IntentWeave’s SQLite index, without requiring Neo4j.

Try it in 30 seconds

npm install -g @intentweave/cli
cd your-project
iw init
iw index build          # < 3 seconds, zero API calls

See the Rules Catalog live on IntentWeave’s own repo, or read the Semantic Rule Checking reference for the full rule-type list.