Haystack Code Reviewer - Review code as a visual story on an infinite canvas
Haystack analyzes and organizes the changes in a pull request and guides you through them in a logical sequence on an interactive canvas.
Haystack enables you to spend time on the stuff that matters, like providing feedback or internalizing changes.
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Haystack Editor
Hi Product Hunt Community!
We’re excited to share Haystack Code Reviewer, a tool that analyzes, chunks, and organizes the changes made in a pull request and guides you through them in a logical sequence on an interactive canvas. We hope that Haystack cuts down on the time that you spend piecing together what's happening in the pull request, so that you can spend time on the parts that matter, like providing feedback or internalizing the changes.
Why did we build Haystack Code Reviewer?
Code reviews today are line-by-line diffs. This format makes reviewers focus on individual changes to catch bugs, style issues, and bad variable names, rather than the bigger picture of what the code is doing and why.
However, we don’t think that’s what code reviews are for. Tests (and angry users) catch bugs. Linters catch style issues. And nitpicks almost always bog down the review and make it take longer for the code to merge.
I believe that the point of a code review is to help teammates understand how the author is trying to achieve their goal, whether that’s a bug fix, a new feature, or a refactor. A good review requires understanding the narrative behind a change, determining whether the structure of a pull request matches that narrative (interface changes, new data structures, etc.), and deciding whether a team is OK with maintaining this new shape of the codebase.
The current pull request interface makes this hard. It's just a wall of unordered diffs that you're left to piece together by jumping between files. When reviewing a PR from a teammate, we found ourselves spending more time reconstructing the big picture of the changes than reviewing the code itself.
So we built Haystack to help with that. It breaks down a pull request into logical chunks and lays them out on an infinite canvas. It’s designed to walk you through the entire pull request in a logical sequence, rather than just show you which lines have changed. We hope Haystack makes code reviews less of a last-minute, unwanted chore. And if it doesn’t, we want to hear about it!
How do I try out Haystack Code Reviewer?
Take a look at the demo playground haystackeditor.com/playground
Watch a walkthrough youtu.be/K_qLwXFwr8I
Try it at haystackeditor.dev
Platus (YC F24)
Haystack sounds like a game-changer for shifting focus back to the bigger picture in code reviews. How does it handle more complex PRs with multiple files or deep dependencies—does it still keep the flow clear and easy to follow?
Haystack Editor
@felixgerlach
We have two ways to make this easier/better currently:
You can make arrows only appear for the specific code you're looking at. Let's use a made-up scenario where function A uses function B and function C, and function B is used in 50 different places. If you are just looking at function A we will only show the connections to C and B (so the 49 other connections B has don't clog the screen).
Deeply dependent components (like function B in the previous example) are often given its own section, and all usages of these components are given their own section right beneath it. E.g. if you just refactored function B to have an extra parameter, those changes are pretty easy to just glance over, so there would be a section called "refactored all callers of function B to use new parameter X", where you'd 50 or so changes that roughly look the same. Since these are grouped together, the reviewer can likely look over them quickly and move on.
SimilarTube
Congrats on the launch, Akshay! Haystack looks great for simplifying the code review process. Excited to see how it helps developers efficiently provide feedback.
Visual code reviews are genius! Streamlines my workflow. 👍
Something that the industry really needed!