A local code review tool for giving structured, line-level feedback to AI coding agents — without opening a PR.

Review uncommitted changes in a GitHub-style diff view, leave inline comments, and export a Markdown file you can feed directly back to your AI agent.

After an AI coding agent edits files in your repo, there's no lightweight way to give it precise, line-level feedback. Opening a GitHub PR just to leave review comments on local changes is overkill. Copy-pasting file paths and line numbers into chat is error-prone and loses context.

review-for-agent gives you a familiar PR review UI that runs entirely on your machine and outputs a structured Markdown file the agent can consume.

• GitHub-style diff view — unified or split, powered by @pierre/diffs
• Inline comments — click a line number to comment; shift-click to select a range
• File-level comments — feedback on an entire file, not tied to a specific line
• Global review comment — overall feedback at the top of the review
• Structured export — outputs both JSON and agent-friendly Markdown with diff context snippets
• Clipboard integration — copies review my comments on these changes in @rfa/comments_xxxx.md to your clipboard on submit, ready to paste into your agent
• Local — no GitHub, no PRs. Single binary runtime with embedded frontend bundle

Download the latest binary for your platform from the GitHub Releases page.

# macOS (Apple Silicon)
# This creates: dist/review-for-agent-darwin-arm64
unzip review-for-agent_darwin_arm64.zip
mv dist/review-for-agent-darwin-arm64 /usr/local/bin/review-for-agent

# Linux (x86_64)
tar -xzf review-for-agent_*_linux_amd64.tar.gz
mv review-for-agent /usr/local/bin/

# Linux (ARM64)
tar -xzf review-for-agent_*_linux_arm64.tar.gz
mv review-for-agent /usr/local/bin/

Requires Go 1.23+.

go install github.com/Waraq-Labs/review-for-agent@v0.5.2

git clone https://github.com/Waraq-Labs/review-for-agent.git
cd review-for-agent
make setup
make build

Requires Go 1.23+, Node.js, and pnpm.

# terminal 1
make dev-api

# terminal 2
make dev-web

make dev-web runs Vite and proxies /api/* to http://localhost:4000.

Run from the root of any Git repo with uncommitted changes:

$ review-for-agent
Listening on localhost:4000
Opening http://localhost:4000/review

To bind to a specific host, set RFA_HOST.

$ RFA_HOST=0.0.0.0 review-for-agent
Listening on 0.0.0.0:4000
Opening http://localhost:4000/review

Your browser opens with a diff of all uncommitted changes. Leave comments, then click Submit Review.

Wrote rfa/comments_5ae2.json
Wrote rfa/comments_5ae2.md

The Markdown file path is copied to your clipboard as:

review my comments on these changes in @rfa/comments_5ae2.md

Paste that into your AI agent's chat to have it address your feedback.

• RFA_HOST: IP/interface to bind the server to. Defaults to all interfaces.
  • Set RFA_HOST=0.0.0.0 to allow access from other machines on your network.

Use this to quickly render a template sample without going through the web UI:

# prints sample markdown to stdout
review-for-agent sample-template

If you use pi, install/load the PI extension from https://github.com/theonejb/pi-extensions/blob/main/review-for-agent.ts and run /reload.

The extension auto-starts review-for-agent in Git repos and adds /rfa-open to quickly jump back to the active review session in the browser.

1. Click a line number to add a single-line comment
2. Click a line, then shift-click another to comment on a range
3. Click "+ File comment" in a file header for file-level feedback
4. Type a global comment in the textarea at the bottom
5. Click "Submit Review" to export

The server tries port 4000 first, then increments until it finds a free port.

If there are paths you never want in local review diffs (for example generated frontend bundles), add a .rfaignore file at repo root.

Example:

frontend/build/

review-for-agent reads .rfaignore at startup and excludes matching paths when generating tracked and untracked diffs. Use one pattern per line. Empty lines and lines beginning with # are ignored.

Lockfiles are always excluded by the server, even if they are not listed in .rfaignore:

• package-lock.json
• pnpm-lock.yaml

Comments are written to the rfa/ directory (created if it doesn't exist).

The Markdown output is generated from templates/comments.md.tmpl and is intended for AI-agent consumption.

The exact wording and layout are intentionally template-defined and may evolve over time.

review-for-agent treats Markdown as a human/agent-readable handoff artifact, not a strict machine contract. For exact current output, use:

• templates/comments.md.tmpl (source template)
• review-for-agent sample-template (quick preview)

The JSON file contains the raw structured data for programmatic use:

{
  "globalComment": "Overall, nice progress but a few things to address.",
  "comments": [
    {
      "file": "src/api/handler.ts",
      "startLine": 42,
      "endLine": 42,
      "side": "right",
      "body": "Add error handling here — what happens if the fetch fails?"
    }
  ]
}

• Git
• A modern web browser

MIT