Show HN: Stage CLI – An easier way of reading your AI generated changes locally

Show HN: Stage CLI – An easier way of reading your AI generated changes locally(github.com)

46 points by cpan22 11 days ago | 32 comments

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 :)

mkw5053 10 days ago |

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.

cpan22 10 days ago | |

Great let us know what you think!

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

ihatemodels 10 days ago |

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.

adamtaylor_13 10 days ago |

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.

agavra 10 days ago | |

If you do want a native CLI in-terminal for this, try out github.com/agavra/tuicr

cpan22 10 days ago | |

yep sorry about that, we weren't exactly sure what the best framing was

glad you like the idea though! let us know what you think

danenania 10 days ago | |

I mean it’s quite literally a command line interface to their tool… what else should it be called that differentiates it from a pure browser flow?

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.

elliotbnvl 10 days ago | | |

While you are not factually incorrect, my expectations were subverted in the same way that OOP's were.

hajekt2 10 days ago |

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?

dean_stratakos 10 days ago | |

the cool part is that you can run the skill from the same agent session so it has the context on the plan and implementation process

but if you run the skill in a fresh session, it naturally wouldn't have the plan

sanufar 10 days ago |

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)?

dean_stratakos 10 days ago | |

appreciate it! and yep, we've got lots of ideas on the roadmap to bring a more complete iteration experience closer to the coding agent.

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

sanufar 10 days ago | | |

yeah, i definitely feel like we're currently in a very time-sparse model for review, when a lot of changes can be condensed locally. it'd reduce a lot of friction and also save a lot of compute costs if we were able to left-shift a lot of our current review work

danenania 10 days ago |

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?

cpan22 10 days ago | |

yes! we've found that reading changes this way make it very easy to separate the important stuff from the unimportant stuff, and we're thinking of ways to make that more visible in the UI

danenania 10 days ago | | |

Cool, good to hear. I think it’s often the case even within an individual file or change that it’s 90% routine and 10% critical to review. That’s a big part of the problem in my mind.

tim-projects 10 days ago |

> 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.

cpan22 10 days ago | |

we're planning on adding it!

pi-victor 10 days ago |

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.

dean_stratakos 10 days ago | |

parley looks awesome! we're planning to add support for comments soon, which is definitely a key feature to being able to iterate back and forth with a coding agent

AussieWog93 10 days ago |

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

cpan22 10 days ago | |

Nope! this is completely free :)

AussieWog93 10 days ago | | |

Oh damn, I'll be installing this after work for sure!

Meliwat93 10 days ago |

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

horanglabs 8 days ago |

I like the chapter concept. That’s a neat idea.

burnJS 10 days ago |

This feature exists already. It's called git.

Brainspackle 10 days ago |

what's wrong with "git diff"?

AussieWog93 10 days ago | |

AIs will make often make multiple "commits" worth of changes, and working out what's been done and why from a git diff is often quite hard.

cpan22 10 days ago | | |

+1, git diffs show you the changes in repository list order but sometimes it makes more sense to read certain things first - our tool does just that

martianvoid 10 days ago |

This is just git with extra steps...

canadiantim 10 days ago |

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

dean_stratakos 10 days ago | |

Thanks for the kind words! Excited to have you try it out