After almost a year of laboring away, we're thrilled to be launching GitContext in private alpha! GitContext is reinventing the code review process for modern software development teams. It's early and we're just getting started, but we believe we're on the cusp of building something special.
Backstory
With over two decades of experience as developers, we've dedicated countless hours to conducting code reviews. They're an integral part of the software development process and a large portion of our daily work. In fact, we often find ourselves spending as much time reviewing other people's code as we do writing our own. Amazingly, despite the critical role code reviews play, existing tools to conduct them feel wholly inadequate. They are clunky, inefficient, and haven't seen significant updates in the past decade. The user experience is frequently frustrating, failing to align with the evolving needs of modern software development. It's common to hear developers laud their IDEs, but when was the last time a developer genuinely praised their code review tool?
As this year began, we embarked on a mission to change that. We want to transform code reviews from a tedious chore into a delightful experience. We believe you should be able to conduct code reviews quickly and efficiently with a smile on your face. We want to hear developers raving about their code review tool in the same breadth as their IDE. A superior code review tool should be designed to meet the demands of the modern software development experience, easily able to handle complex branch dependencies, corporate compliance requirements, merge queues, complicated build processes, and so much more. All the while the valuable context and data generated during the review process shouldn't go to waste, it should be retained and turned into actionable insights, significantly enhancing future development cycles.
Today's Release
With an eye toward this future, today we're launching GitContext in private alpha. We've reimagined the code review process from the ground up with a maniacal focus on incredible UX and usability. We're just starting to bring our vision to life, but we think GitContext is already far ahead of existing tools. We've made it lightning fast and efficient to review code, turning a painful part of the software development process into an enjoyable experience. We're eliminating review déjà vu with intelligent progress tracking, adding smart workflows for identifying and resolving blocking issues, removing delays by tracking and prompting participants whose turn it is to act, allowing users to opt out of areas outside their expertise, and so much more. Some of the changes may seem subtle, but the experience is anything but.
If you conduct code reviews, we'd love for you to join our private alpha and experience it for yourself.
Where we're headed
While we believe GitContext in its current form is a significant improvement over existing code review tools, it's just the tip of the iceberg. Our focus to date has been on building a first class user experience for conducting code reviews. With this foundation in place, we're turning our focus to a host of challenges that we believe have long since been ignored by existing tools, as well as some novel enhancements. This includes intelligently routing code reviews, showcasing visual changes, enforcing guidelines, better understanding what's being shipped, and much more.
We have a ton of ideas of where we can take this, but ultimately we're going to be guided by you, our potential customers. We're going to be maniacally focused on talking to customers and building something people want. If you work in software development and feel code reviews could be better, we want to talk to you. If you just want to see all the hairbrained stuff we're going to release, we would love for you to join our private alpha.
What about AI?
Allow us to state the obvious - AI is barrelling its way into the software development process at breakneck speed. We firmly believe AI will be an integral part of software development, from AI-written code to AI-assisted reviews, and the need for tools that can help navigate this paradigm shift will become essential. We're excited for this future and think it's an incredible time to be building a product at the junction of code generation and deployment.
Our team is exploring various methods to embed AI into the code review process. These range from simple tasks like summarizing pull requests to more sophisticated automated code review agents. In this emerging world we believe we can make it easier to support any AI of your choosing, even if it’s not developed or integrated by our team.
Presently, AI is incredibly adept at automated error checking, helping maintain code quality, enforcing conventions and best practices, as well as highlighting security concerns - and we're actively working on solutions on all these fronts. It is slightly less adept at understanding the broader context of a code review and how it relates to a larger code base, an area where humans still have an upper hand. But as context windows continue to get larger, and local models trained over entire code bases become more cost efficient to implement and run, AI review agents will only get better.
What's with the name, GitContext?
It's a play on numerous concepts we think are important to the code review process. For starters, we believe it's important that pull requests are created with all the necessary context to conduct a review. GitContext will aid developers in generating this context, whether through text explanations, screen captures, or video recordings. Moreover, a significant challenge in code reviews is the ephemeral nature of valuable discussions and conversations, which often vanish, leaving the evolution of the code undocumented. Our tool aims to capture and preserve this context, ensuring the history of the code's development is not lost. In an era that is going to be increasingly dominated by artificial intelligence, maintaining this context is of paramount importance.
That said, GitContext is our working title, and we may change the name in the future as the project evolves.
We love your help
If you develop software and conduct code reviews, we'd love to hear from you. We're trying to gather as much input as we can from as many teams as are willing. If you want to kick the tires and try out what we've built thus far, feel free to sign up for our private alpha and we'll do our best to let you in.
Thanks for all the help and support. We're excited for what the future holds!
Cheers,
Mike & Tristan
Co-Founders of GitContext
