No code. The lawyer hintbook applies the same machinery to legal drafting: declare the parties, clauses, obligations, and red lines in plain Markdown, and HINT compiles a binding brief for a senior attorney persona that drafts, revises, or audits — inventing no facts, names, amounts, dates, or citations.
A definition is defined once, capitalized as defined, with no synonyms — the assistant enforces it mechanically across every provision.
A redline carries explicit never-concede language; a never block is enforced with the strongest wording in the book.
Missing figures, dates, and citations come back as reported gaps with their risk — never filled with something plausible.
For decades, software teams kept their work inside hard borders: a written spec, versioned in the repo, reviewed line by line, built the same way every time. HINT brings that exact discipline to drafting. Your parties, clauses, and red lines become a specification that lives beside the document, travels through the same review, and compiles identically on every run.
.hint specs that bind the draft--mode review audits the document against the specNo new syntax. An obligation under a clause, a remedy under a breach, a fallback under a position — nesting expresses the structure, and each keyword compiles into a binding drafting directive.
The confidentiality clause becomes a draft prompt for a senior-attorney persona — then, under --mode review, a findings report that quotes the document's exact language against each block.
$ hint --mode review contracts/nda.md | claude -p
Quoted: "…shall survive in perpetuity." Directly violates the Survival red line (5 years, never perpetual). Correcting language: "…shall survive for five (5) years following disclosure."
No carve-out for legally compelled disclosure. The Compelled exception is declared but absent from the draft. Add it with the prior-notice requirement.
"confidential information" appears lower-cased. The defined term must be capitalized consistently throughout to remain enforceable.
Verdict: does not conform — 1 violation, 1 gap, 1 risk.
A senior attorney drafting from a binding specification.
Read parties, defined terms, governing law, and red lines first; draft complete documents — no bracketed stubs unless declared.
hint contracts/...
Where the document and the spec disagree, the document is wrong.
Smallest conforming revision; structure, numbering, defined terms, and style preserved; each change reported with its rationale. With a hint.lock it revises only the blocks that drifted — and returns the document unchanged when it already conforms.
hint --mode fix
Findings, never redlines.
Walk the spec block by block, quote the document's exact language, hunt prohibited content and red-line breaches, rank by severity.
hint --mode review
The Pearson Specter Litt demo keeps the matter's parties, positions, and red lines in .hint files — so every draft, revision, and review answers to the same source of truth.
A folder _.hint declares the jurisdiction, the party names, and the firm's drafting style — inherited by every document.
The non-compete spec nests a prohibition, its condition and exception, a breach → remedy chain, and the source on restraint-of-trade limits.
hint contracts/employment.md | claude -p produces a complete first draft with defined terms consistent and no invented figures.
--mode review checks their markup against your red lines — the perpetual-survival edit comes back as a flagged violation, not a missed one.
hint verify confirms every declared party, definition, and exhibit is actually used in the draft — deterministic, no tokens — then hint lock records it, so unchanged specs are skipped and edits reconcile only what drifted.
Then just keep talking to your assistant. hint apply writes the HINT workflow into your AGENTS.md and CLAUDE.md — so Claude Code, Codex, and Cursor call hint on their own whenever a matter’s .hint spec is relevant. No need to run it by hand.
draft mode footer states this explicitly in its output.
Declare the deal once. Draft, revise, and audit every document against the same binding specification.