I’ve been wondering about that, too. FlakeHeaven / FlakeHell does that for Python, but it’s the only example I can think of: https://flakeheaven.readthedocs.io/en/latest/commands/baseli...

Grovel over your linter's command-line options and/or configuration file. It's not an uncommon feature but from my personal and limited experience it is also not always advertised as well as you like. For instance, golangci-lint has not just a feature to check only changed code, but several variants of it available, but I think possibly the only places that these are mentioned on its site are in the specific documentation of the issues configuration YAML documentation: https://golangci-lint.run/docs/configuration/file/#issues-co... written in a My Eyes Glaze Over coloration scheme [1], and mentioned in the last FAQ, which means reading to the bottom of that page to find out about it.

Most mature systems that can issue warnings about source code (linters, static analyzers, doc style enforcers, anything like that) have this feature somewhere because they all immediately encounter the problem that any new assertion about source code applied to code base even just two or three person-months large will immediately trigger vast swathes of code, and then immediately destroy their own market by being too scary to ever turn on. So it's a common problem with a fairly common solution. Just not always documented well.

[1]: Let me just grumble that in general coloration schemes should not try to "deprioritize" comments visually, but it is particularly a poor choice when the comments are the documentation in the most literal sense. I like my comment colors distinct, certainly, but not hidden.

Rubocop allows generation of a TODO file, which is basically an extra config file that you include in the main one and that contains current violations per cop+file and sets appropriate values to cops that have numerical limits.

From there on you can only go one direction.

OP's ratchet would simply be a new custom cop that matches a string, and the whole ignore existing violations would Just Work (and actually "better" since one wouldn't be able to move the pattern around)

the more recent term i’ve heard is “bulk suppression” eg https://eslint.org/blog/2025/04/introducing-bulk-suppression...

Python linters have a one-step way to suppress all individual errors. I assumed a SaaS like Sourcegraph is the only solution to ensure a codebase doesnt become worse.

Honestly it would be better to bake in source control context so you can mark new code as more strict than legacy.

You can usually achieve this by adding ignore pragmas to your legacy warnings (although you need to touch that code). But at least that way, daily workflow will see errors and you can find the legacy errors by disabling the pragma.