Posted by cpan22 2 days ago
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 :)
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.
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.
And yeah, I think number 5 on your list is particularly interesting - juniors will develop much slower if they don't go through the struggle of understanding implementation
We're hoping that our tool can help make that easier
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.
glad you like the idea though! let us know what you think
What you are describing sounds more like “TUI” than “CLI” imo. A CLI is an interface—it’s about the input step. It makes no promise about what happens after that.
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?
but if you run the skill in a fresh session, it naturally wouldn't have the plan
we've found it pretty silly that we have to push to GitHub in order to get comments from a review bot, pull them down locally, then rinse and repeat. the whole agentic coding landscape could benefit from some centralization
If this tool was in the terminal I'd use it.