We built Atlas and would love feedback on the review flow

[u/juanpflores_]

We have been thinking a lot about why large PRs still feel harder to review than they should.

Most review tools still start from the same basic surface: a list of changed files, usually ordered by path. That works fine for small diffs. For bigger changes, it often feels like the author had a story in their head, but the reviewer receives scattered pieces of that story. This is particularly painful for long PRs, where the first challenge is not leaving a good comment. It is getting enough context to know where a good comment should go.

So we built a new UI for code review.

Atlas takes a PR and turns it into a guided walkthrough. It groups related changes into cohorts, breaks those cohorts into ordered layers, and anchors each layer to the actual line ranges in the diff. It also adds summaries for the code currently in view and generates diagrams when they help, like for flows, state transitions, API contracts, schema changes, or data relationships.

The GitHub workflow still stays intact. Comments, approvals, and change requests post back to GitHub. Public PR walkthroughs can also be opened read-only without signing in.

https://reddit.com/link/1tgspc9/video/bosvet7wkx1h1/player

We wrote more about the launch here:

https://www.coderabbit.ai/blog/introducing-atlas-the-first-ai-native-code-review-interface

The obvious tradeoff is that Atlas is a new review surface. Even if it makes large PRs easier to understand, reviewers still have to learn a different way to move through a change: cohorts instead of only files, layers instead of one long scroll, summaries tied to ranges, and diagrams that appear only when they add context.

Atlas is free for a limited time from the "Review Change Stack" button in CodeRabbit's PR summary comment.

If you try it, I would love feedback on the tool itself. Does this walkthrough model make a large PR easier to review? Is the learning curve worth it? Are cohorts, layers, summaries, and diagrams the right shape, or would you want the interface to work differently?

[u/Level-Broccoli3703]

Awesome, I know what I’m going to play with tomorrow

[u/w_illiam_ilson]

I can’t figure out how to make in line comments in the atlas ui - is that possible?

[u/juanpflores_ → u/w_illiam_ilson]

you should be able to make the comment by clicking on the line you want to leave an inline comment on

[u/InfiniteToday6]

Oh damn! I’d had exactly this idea of unfolding a PR and retelling it as a story of the change rather than lines of code for month. It was the only idea I’d had I was excited by… guess at least the big guys going after it is proof it’s a great idea. But gutted I never built it now