Code review can be better

81 sealeck 28 8/20/2025, 11:10:37 PM tigerbeetle.com ↗

Comments (28)

tomasreimers · 37m ago
Just taking a step back, it is SO COOL to me to be reading about stacked pull requests on HN.

When we started graphite.dev years ago that was a workflow most developers had never heard of unless they had previously been at FB / Google.

Fun to see how fast code review can change over 3-4yrs :)

foota · 8m ago
I miss the fig workflow :-(
jacobegold · 34m ago
hell yeah
ivanjermakov · 2h ago
I find the idea of using git for code reviews directly quite compelling. Working with the change locally as you were the one who made it is very convenient, considering the clunky read-only web UI.

I didn't get why stick with the requirement that review is a single commit? To keep git-review implementation simple?

I wonder if approach where every reviewer commits their comments/fixes to the PR branch directly would work as well as I think it would. One might not even need any additional tools to make it convenient to work with. This idea seems like a hybrid of traditional github flow and a way Linux development is organized via mailing lists and patches.

koolba · 57m ago
> When I review code, I like to pull the source branch locally. Then I soft-reset the code to mere base, so that the code looks as if it was written by me.

This is eerily similar to how I review large changes that do not have a clear set of commits. The real problem is working with people that don’t realize that if you don’t break work down into small self contained units, everybody else is going to have to do it individually. Nobody can honestly say they can review tons of diffs to a ton of files and truly understand what they’ve reviewed.

The whole is more than just the sum of the parts.

jacobegold · 31m ago
It's so cool that Git is considering first class change IDs!! That's huge! This sounds similar to what we had at Facebook to track revisions in Phabricator diffs. Curious if anyone knows the best place to read about this?
hydroxideOH- · 2h ago
I use the GitHub Pull Request extension in VSCode to do the same thing (reviewing code locally in my editor). It works pretty well, and you can add/review comments directly in the editor.
ivanjermakov · 2h ago
It's better, but still quite deep vendor lock-in (in both GitHub and VSCode).
hydroxideOH- · 1h ago
Well my employer chooses to use GitHub so I don’t have a choice there. And it’s vendor lock-in VSCode but that’s already my primary editor so it means there’s no need to learn another tool just for code review.
cyberax · 24m ago
JetBrains IDEs can do the same.
NortySpock · 37m ago
GitHub may be dominant, but it's not like it doesn't have competitors nipping at its heels (GitLab, BitBucket come to mind).

VSCode is open source, and there are plenty of IDEs...

I guess I'm just focused on different lock-in concerns than you are.

cebert · 2h ago
I use this a lot too. Also, if you open a PR on the GitHub website and press the “.” key, it opens the review in VSCode, which I consider a much better web experience.
reilly3000 · 1h ago
TIL thanks.
MutedEstate45 · 1h ago
Agree with your pain points. One thing id add is GitHub makes you reapprove every PR after each push. As an OSS contributor it’s exhausting to chase re-approvals for minor tweaks.
irjustin · 1h ago
mmmm this is up to each repo/maintainer's settings.

To be fair you don't know if one line change is going to absolutely compromise a flow. OSS needs to maintain a level of disconnect to be safe vs fast.

MutedEstate45 · 39m ago
Good to know! Never been a maintainer before so I thought that was required.
pie_flavor · 1h ago
This is a security setting that the author has chosen to enable.
Ar-Curunir · 1h ago
Hm that’s not the case for my repositories? Maybe you have a setting enabled for that?
gatane · 21m ago
>remote-first web-interface

https://youtu.be/Qscq3l0g0B8

faangguyindia · 1h ago
Essentially, you are turning fork/branch induced changes to "precommit" review like workflow which is great.

I was on a lookout for best "precommit" review tool and zeroed on Magit, gitui, Sublime Merge.

I am not an emac user, so i'll have to learn this.

xeonmc · 35m ago
In theory this functionality would be best suited as a git subcommand.

I suggest `git-precom` for conciseness.

faangguyindia · 27m ago
Git already has `git add -p` but demands a lot from user.
Pxtl · 1m ago
Git demands a lot from user in general.
shmerl · 4m ago
I was recently looking for something that at least presents a nice diff that resembles code review one in neovim.

This is a pretty cool tool for it: https://github.com/sindrets/diffview.nvim

On the branch that you are reviewing, you can do something like this:

:DiffviewOpen origin/HEAD...HEAD

loeg · 31m ago
I've used Reviewboard and Phabricator and both seem "fine" to me. Superior to Github (at the time, anyway).
moonlion_eth · 32m ago
ersc.io
loeg · 30m ago
Say more.
citizenpaul · 29m ago
I got into using Jujutsu this year. I'm liking it so far. Is there a beta access in the works?