alt Hacker NewsShow HN: Stage CLI – An easier way of reading your AI generated changes locally
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 :)
Comments
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 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.
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)?
> 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.
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.
This is just git with extra steps...
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?
Cool, simple demo that concisely shows the value. I’ll give it a whirl. Cheers and good luck, seems great
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Do we need a paid Stage account to use this tool? US$30/mo is a big ask for home hobbyist use!