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!