Hey HN! We're Charles and Dean. A few weeks ago we posted about Stage, a code review tool that guides you through reading a PR step by step - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47796818.

We got a lot of great feedback but also heard from many people that they wanted to have the chapters experience even before opening a PR… so we built the Stage CLI as the local, open-source version that anyone can try.

Here’s a quick demo video: https://www.tella.tv/video/stage-cli-demo-f55q

It works with any coding agent of your choice. The skill instructs the agent to read your current branch’s changes, break them down into separate logical chapters, and open them in a local browser.

We’ve found that reading changes this way is a lot easier for us than reading them in an IDE or other similar CLI tools, which present diffs to you in repository tree order. You can see a few examples of what it feels like here: https://stagereview.app/explore.

Try it out and let us know what you think! Would love to hear any feedback :)

You're solving a real problem, and despite beeing a bit broke ATM, I'd be willing to pay for a tool like this given the amount of time I spend on review.

My current workflow: I use GitHub web to look at my commits and leave inline comments on the lines. Then I have Claude Code fetch all the comments and apply the changes or answer my questions.

I don't always have multiple commitsn: sometimes it's just one big commit that I then ask the AI to split, and usually after a full review. I wouldn't say it's a common use case, but it's mine.

To give you an idea of how much I try to optimize this part of my work, I installed Stylus (a Chrome extension) to change GitHub's syntax highlighting colors, so I'm glad you've integrated something similar natively.

That said, with my big commits of several hundred or even thousands of lines, your Stage tool and the hosted version are unusable compared to GitHub web. I think improving performance should be a priority, probably through virtualization (windowing).

Another issue: I never open PRs. As I mentioned, I comment directly on my commits on a branch. PRs make sense for a team workflow, but I work solo.

Looks cool and will give it a try.

I've been spending a lot of my energy lately on how to run eng teams where we:

1. Maximize long-term shipping velocity

2. Maximize quality (whatever that means)

3. Maintain minimal complexity

4. Are intentional about which skills we let atrophy, which we keep sharp, and which new ones we have to build

5. Make juniors more capable, not just more productive

These are always in tension.

I've been thinking about instituting some sort of socratic method during planning and review plus spaced interval testing to ensure both the humans and AI coding agents understand and find some max of the factors above.

Minor nitpick: This isn't what I expected when I read "CLI". I envisioned a terminal-native experience. Unless I skimmed over this way too fast, this is a browser experience that you trigger from the terminal.

EDIT: I should mention that I think the idea is cool. We're in a new age where reviewing large amounts of unfamiliar code has become a larger problem than it was previously.

This looks useful. With AI generated code the hardest part is reviewing it.

A normal git diff gets messy once the agent changes several files for different reasons. Grouping the change into “chapters” seems like the right idea.

Do you infer those chapters only from the diff, or can you also use the agent’s original plan/task history?

Looks cool! Chapters is definitely something I've been angling towards as well. Any plans on going in the other direction (directly incorporating rich feedback/review into the agent loop through Stage)?

Interested to try this! Have you thought about separating the parts of a PR that are routine/uninteresting from the parts that are load-bearing and need more careful review?

> We’ve found that reading changes this way is a lot easier for us than reading them in an IDE or other similar CLI tools

If this tool was in the terminal I'd use it.

love this. i had the same issue with ai generated code and wrote parley. https://parley.cloudflavor.io it's a TUI that can help you review code by enabling you to comment on the diff itself. but i like this approach of organizing code into chapters. i think what my tool is missing this exact thing.

Do we need a paid Stage account to use this tool? US$30/mo is a big ask for home hobbyist use!

Love the idea. This would have been a game-changer in previous projects I've worked on.

This feature exists already. It's called git.

what's wrong with "git diff"?

This is just git with extra steps...

Cool, simple demo that concisely shows the value. I’ll give it a whirl. Cheers and good luck, seems great