What is Local Review?
Local Review is a review UI for stacks of commits, before they become pull requests. It runs on your own machine, looks like GitHub’s pull-request page, and shows every commit on your branch as its own PR, grouped into colour-coded PR stacks. You read the diffs, leave comments, and mark each PR ready. Nothing is pushed anywhere.
An AI coding agent can write a dozen tidy commits in an afternoon. Reviewing them properly is the slow part, and GitHub is a poor place to start: once a PR is open, other people can see it, CI runs on it, and every round of fixes is a force-push. Local Review moves that first review onto your machine:
- Review the stack you meant to send. Split one branch, or several branches across several repos, into the stacks of PRs you intend to open. Review each commit as the PR it will become, then reshape the stack before anyone else sees it.
- Talk to your agent in the review. Your comments are saved as plain YAML files. Your agent reads them, fixes the commits, and replies by writing into the same files; the replies show up in the browser as it works.
- Publish when it’s ready. Once a stack is ready, your agent opens it on GitHub as native stacked PRs, with the titles and descriptions you approved, and records what it created back in Local Review. It sits in front of whatever you stack with: see Works with your stacking tool.
What it never does
Section titled “What it never does”Local Review is deliberately small and careful:
- It never modifies the repos it shows you. All git access is read-only (read-only guarantee).
- It never talks to GitHub. Your agent does the git and GitHub work.
- It never deletes your review, and snapshots it automatically (never-delete guarantee).
- It only listens on localhost (localhost security).
And so you can never mistake it for the real thing, its header is deep plum with an amber underline, not GitHub’s.