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dean_stratakos

5 karma · joined November 19, 2022

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dean_stratakos··on Show HN: Stage CLI – An easier way of reading your AI generated changes locally
Thanks for the kind words! Excited to have you try it out
dean_stratakos··on Show HN: Stage CLI – An easier way of reading your AI generated changes locally
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

dean_stratakos··on Show HN: Stage CLI – an easier way of reading your AI generated changes locally
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

dean_stratakos··on Show HN: Stage CLI – an easier way of reading your AI generated changes locally
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
dean_stratakos··on Show HN: Stage – Putting humans back in control of code review
Ideally, the world trends towards enabling less technical people to get more involved in the whole software loop! Stage is still geared toward a more technical audience, but I think we are going to start reviewing at a higher level for certain types of software or areas of the codebase where we assign more trust to agents to write proper code
dean_stratakos··on Show HN: Stage – Putting humans back in control of code review
Yeah it's getting easier to have agents just add "one more thing" to a PR, and I think there is still an aspect of human engineering judgement to know when to break up PRs versus trusting AI/tools to keep velocity high.

In the ideal world, each PR is as small and self-contained as possible but we've noticed people struggling to justify the extra overhead every time.

dean_stratakos··on Show HN: Stage – Putting humans back in control of code review
Agree that agents are definitely handling more and more of the coding side, and there's almost no doubt they will get better slop-wise.

In our view, even vibe coders should understand how the codebase works, and we think review is a natural place to pause and make sure you know what you and your coworkers are shipping. And we should have tools to reduce the mental load as much as possible.

Do you think there's a problem of cognitive debt among your coworkers who aren't reading the code or reviewing PRs?

dean_stratakos··on Show HN: Stage – Putting humans back in control of code review
It's possible, but at the same time it's been years and they haven't copied things like Graphite's dashboard or stacked PR interface yet. We have the advantage of speed :)
dean_stratakos··on Show HN: Stage – Putting humans back in control of code review
In our experience, it's difficult to create well-mannered commits as you code and new ideas pop into your head or you iterate on different designs (even for LLMs). One concept we toyed around with was telling an LLM to re-do a branch using "perfect commits" right before putting up a PR. But even then you might discover new edge cases and have to tack them on as additional commits.

We thought git wasn't the right level of abstraction and decided to tackle things at the PR level instead. Curious to hear your experiences!

dean_stratakos··on Show HN: Stage – Putting humans back in control of code review
Chapters are regenerated every time a new commit is pushed to a PR. Our thinking is that the chapters should serve as "auto stacked diffs" since they should follow a logical order.

Do you or your team use stacking in your workflows?

dean_stratakos··on Show HN: Stage – Putting humans back in control of code review
We don't support that currently, but would love to see examples where you disagree with the chapters so we can figure out the best interface

You can regenerate the chapters anytime, but it might lead to similar results as the first time

dean_stratakos··on Show HN: Stage – Putting humans back in control of code review
100%. A big part of code review in my mind is to automate away specific mistakes and anti-patterns across a team. I think there are a lot of interesting things to be done to merge the code writing and code reviewing cycles.
dean_stratakos··on Show HN: Stage – Putting humans back in control of code review
Yeah that could be useful, especially with the increased popularity of stacked PRs

But I see it working together with chapters, not instead of bc it's still good to see the granularity within a PR