Building Meridian: Week 1-2 Update — Exhausted, Excited, and Still Going

I'm building Criterion — a GitLab AI agent that reviews merge requests and surfaces forgotten design decisions before they cause production incidents. This is my submission for the GitLab AI Hackathon. Deadline: March 25. The clock is very much ticking. What Criterion Does Every engineering team has this problem: a developer refactors some auth code, not knowing it was carefully designed 8 months ago to handle an enterprise SSO edge case. It merges. It breaks in production. A P0 incident follows. Criterion sits inside your GitLab workflow and catches this before it happens. When you open a merge request, Criterion: Traces git blame on changed lines back to the original commits, MRs, and issues Asks Claude to extract not just WHAT was decided, but WHY — the business reason, the security constraint, the incident that caused it Posts a structured comment directly on your MR before you merge Uses confidence-based actions: block at 90%+, warn at 70%+, inform at 50%+ The goal is simple: prev