Nicheloom

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Stage

Putting humans back in control of code review

Details

External ID
47796818
Source
HN
Company
—
Product
Stage
Website domain
stagereview.app
Launched
April 16, 2026
Cohort
—
Upvotes
130
Upvotes percentile
0.9190231362467867
Tags
—
Fetched at
Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
Updated at
Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.

Description

Hey HN! We're Charles and Dean, and we're building Stage: a code review tool that guides you through reading a PR step by step, instead of piecing together a giant diff.Here's a demo video: https://www.tella.tv/video/stage-demo-1pph. You can play around with some example PRs here: https://stagereview.app/explore.Teams are moving faster than ever with AI these days, but more and more engineers are merging changes that they don't really understand. The bottleneck isn't writing code anymore, it's reviewing it.We're two engineers who got frustrated with GitHub's UI for code review. As coding agents took off, we saw our PR backlog pile up faster than we could handle. Not only that, the PRs themselves were getting larger and harder to understand, and we found ourselves spending most of our time trying to build a mental model of what a PR was actually doing.We built Stage to make reviewing a PR feel more like reading chapters of a book, not an unorganized set of paragraphs. We use it every day now, not just to review each other's code but also our own, and at this point we can't really imagine going back to the old GitHub UI.What Stage does: when a PR is opened, Stage groups the changes into small, logical "chapters". These chapters get ordered in the way that makes most sense to read. For each chapter, Stage tells you what changed and specific things to double check. Once you review all the chapters, you're done reviewing the PR.You can sign in to Stage with your GitHub account and everything is synced seamlessly (commenting, approving etc.) so it fits into the workflows you're already used to.What we're not building: a code review bot like CodeRabbit or Greptile. These tools are great for catching bugs (and we use them ourselves!) but at the end of the day humans are responsible for what gets shipped. It's clear that reviewing code hasn't scaled the same way that writing did, and they (we!) need better tooling to keep up with the onslaught of AI generated code, which is only going to grow.We've had a lot of fun building this and are excited to take it further. If you're like us and are also tired of using GitHub for reviewing PRs, we'd love for you to try it out and tell us what you think!

Enrichment

Theme
git and repository workflow tools
Vertical
Horizontal
Function
Workflow automation
Audience
Developer
AI stance
AI feature
Project type
Commercial product
Normalized one-liner
code review platform with human control
Manually corrected
False

Could you build this?

Yes It is a GitHub PR review web application that presents git diffs decomposed into step-by-step walkthrough chunks using standard Git APIs and LLM summarization.

Discussion

20 comments analyzed.

Competitors mentioned: Greptile, Codex, Conductor

Concerns raised: AI-generated summaries may misrepresent code quality and introduce bias, Cannot catch security issues that are absent from diffs (missing auth checks, removed filters), Switching between local and GitHub creates friction, Review process needs to vary by PR type and user preferences

Feature requests: Local-first architecture with sync engine instead of cloud-first, Review flow tailored to specific PR/user preferences, Capture agent conversations in commit history, Support for non-technical stakeholders reviewing PRs

Competitors

Other products that read as similar to this one — 114 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.

Attention rank: #12 of 115 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).

Launched 168 days after the earliest competitor.

Other launches for this product

Same idea, different domain

Nobody's really built a workflow automation tool for Real estate yet.