GoKawiilPIERRE COMPUTER COMPANY █
ON RENDERING DIFFS
Posted on May 29, 2026 by @amadeus
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You open a pull request expecting to understand what changed.
For small and medium changes, everything works. The code is readable, the files are there, you scroll around, add comments, and it’s all pretty seamless.
Then you open something larger. Maybe an agent generated the implementation, tests, fixtures, and snapshots. Maybe the branch just touched more files than expected. Either way, the review surface starts to degrade. It might only show you one file at a time, or require each file to be loaded separately before you can read it, or even make basic navigation feel sluggish.
Some of these are reasonable trade-offs for genuinely hard problems. But they still have a cost: reviewers feel the limits of the tool, and product teams have to build workarounds for these limits.
Diff rendering matters, but for most tools it is not the product. The product is what happens around the code: review workflows, automation, agent output, CI results, and collaboration. Code review should support that work, not become something every team has to build from scratch.
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