locakit

Deterministic i18n engine for AI agents. Your coding agent translates; locakit does everything else — key diffing, staleness tracking, placeholder validation and safe JSON writes.

No translation API. No SaaS account. No API keys. Zero runtime dependencies.

Why

Every AI localization tool ships its own LLM pipeline: configure a provider, pay per token, hope the model gets your product's tone right from a JSON blob. Meanwhile you already have an agent (Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot) that reads your codebase all day — it knows home is a nav label and not a building, because it can open the component and look.

locakit splits the job the right way:

	Who does it
Detect missing / stale keys	locakit (deterministic, lockfile-based)
Understand context, translate	your agent (already paid for, already knows your code)
Validate placeholders, glossary, language rules	locakit (deterministic, CI-friendly)
Write JSON safely, preserve key order	locakit

Quick start

npm i -D locakit
npx locakit init

Edit locakit.config.json:

{
  "source": "en",
  "targets": ["tr", "de"],
  "files": "locales/{locale}.json",
  "context": "Developer portfolio & blog. Tone: professional but warm. Formal address (Sie/siz).",
  "glossary": ["locakit", "GitHub"]
}

Then let your agent drive:

npx locakit diff --json     # what needs translating (+ your context & glossary)
# → agent reads key usage in code, translates, produces a patch
echo '{"tr":{"auth.title":"Hoş geldiniz"}}' | npx locakit apply -
npx locakit check           # exit 1 on broken placeholders, missing keys, glossary violations

A ready-made Claude Code skill that implements this loop lives in skill/i18n-sync/ — copy it to .claude/skills/ or install via ECC.

Commands

Command	Purpose
locakit init	Scaffold locakit.config.json
locakit diff [--json]	List missing and stale keys per target
locakit apply <file | ->	Write a translation patch; rejects keys absent from the source locale
locakit check [--json] [--strict]	Validate all targets; CI-friendly exit codes
locakit lock	Accept current translations as up to date

Staleness tracking

locakit.lock stores a hash of each source string at translation time. When source copy changes, diff reports the key as stale for every affected language — the class of bug where English says "Sign in with passkey" and German still says "Sign in with password".

Validation rules

• placeholder-mismatch (error) — {name}, {{count}}, %s, $t(...) must survive translation intact
• glossary (error) — configured terms must appear unchanged
• missing-key / empty-value (error)
• orphan-key (warning) — translation exists but source key is gone
• Turkish pack (warnings) — tr/suffix-after-placeholder ({name}'in breaks vowel harmony at runtime), tr/dotless-uppercase-i (GIRIS → GİRİŞ), tr/whitespace

Language packs are pluggable; Turkish ships first because generic tools get it wrong the most. PRs for other languages welcome.

Programmatic API

import { diff, apply, check } from "locakit";

const pending = diff(process.cwd());
const result = apply(process.cwd(), { tr: { "home": "Ana Sayfa" } });
const issues = check(process.cwd());

CI

- run: npx locakit check   # fails the build on invalid or missing translations

License

MIT © Berkay Yalçın