CiteGate

What it does. CiteGate is an MCP server that sits between any AI model and any legal draft it touches. Five tools enforce mechanical guarantees no prompt can promise: bind_claim_to_span (every claim must bind to an exact registered evidence span), check_no_new_citations (the model cannot introduce authority that wasn't registered), verify_citation_exists (citations are checked against the public record via CourtListener), check_fact_preservation (dates and numbers must survive across English and Spanish), and grounded_rewrite (GPT-5.6 proposes a repair — and its own output is re-gated before approval).

Why it's infrastructure, not another pipeline. Grounded-citation demos are everywhere this Build Week. CiteGate is not an app with a citation step — it is the step, packaged as infrastructure any MCP client can install. The doctrine is simple: the model proposes, the gate disposes. The distinctive move is grounded_rewrite: even the repair the model writes must re-pass every mechanical gate before it is approved. Existence-checking is honest about its scope: verifying a citation exists is not verifying it says what the draft claims — the README states this limit explicitly.

How we used Codex. The entire implementation was built in a single OpenAI Codex thread (CITEGATE-CORE) in ~20 minutes of focused build: gates → rewrite → MCP server surface → deterministic demo → README/LICENSE, in 5 dated commits. This is a fresh implementation, not copied from our other entry (see disclosure below).

How we used GPT-5.6. In live mode (--live), GPT-5.6 proposes the grounded rewrite through the Responses API with tool calling. While building it, the gate caught a real parsing bug in the Responses API envelope — Codex diagnosed it and the fix became a regression test (grounded_rewrite parses a Responses API envelope with top-level text config). The gate catching its own model's plumbing is the product working as designed.

Test suite. 12/12 passing, including: "grounded_rewrite re-gates and blocks a stubbed model hallucination" and "stdio server surface lists exactly five honestly described tools."

Disclosure. CiteGate is submitted by JRCH Fiducia LLC (Developer Tools), through its authorized Representative. Our founder's separate individual entry, DocketBound (Work & Productivity), is an end-user participation app; CiteGate is standalone developer infrastructure with a fresh codebase. They share a philosophy — mechanical gates over prompts — not code. The repository is hosted under the founder's personal GitHub handle for continuity; CiteGate is authored and solely owned by JRCH Fiducia LLC, as reflected in the repository's MIT license.

Built With

• courtlistener-api
• gpt-5.6-responses-api
• model-context-protocol
• node.js-22
• openai-codex