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"excerpt": "You open a pull request expecting to understand what changed.\n\nFor 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.\n\nThen 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.\n\nSome 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.\n\nDiff 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.\n\nThat is why, about 6 months ago, we released Diffs . Our goal was to make the code and diff rendering part just work, so teams",
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"text": "What an interesting article. I did not assume I would read it until the end when I opened it, but the writing was super clear and easy to follow.<p>At the end, I admire the craft and patience to try to solve code diff rendering, and wish the folks at GitHub could put the same effort to improve their platform.<p>On a side note, I feel that we’re going to see more and more of this type of agentic usage, in well defined sub tasks, and the ability of a model to try many possibilities is a huge gift here.",
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"body": "What an interesting article. I did not assume I would read it until the end when I opened it, but the writing was super clear and easy to follow. At the end, I admire the craft and patience to try to solve code diff rendering, and wish the folks at GitHub could put the same effort to improve their platform. On a side note, I feel that we’re going to see more and more of this type of agentic usage, in well defined sub tasks, and the ability of a model to try many possibilities is a huge gift here.",
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"raw_body": "What an interesting article. I did not assume I would read it until the end when I opened it, but the writing was super clear and easy to follow.<p>At the end, I admire the craft and patience to try to solve code diff rendering, and wish the folks at GitHub could put the same effort to improve their platform.<p>On a side note, I feel that we’re going to see more and more of this type of agentic usage, in well defined sub tasks, and the ability of a model to try many possibilities is a huge gift here.",
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"text": "For anyone else who's suffering, paste this in the console in devtools:<p><pre><code> document.getElementsByTagName('main')[0].style.margin = '0 auto';</code></pre>",
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"raw_body": "For anyone else who's suffering, paste this in the console in devtools:<p><pre><code> document.getElementsByTagName('main')[0].style.margin = '0 auto';</code></pre>",
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"text": "I was hoping that this would talk more about the logic behind generating a diff, rather than the optimisations involved in rendering the text.<p>IMO (as someone who doesn't have to deal with the actual rendering) it would go a bit deeper into talking about deciding how to show <i>what</i> has changed. There's a lot of improvements that could be made there. e.g. "whitespace has changed here" so there's no real code changes involved.<p>Or "this big list of imports has changed, and code formatting has line-wrapped the list into different lines" - gitlab for example copes poorly with this. I'd love to just see a clean diff that highlights the additional import, and not just ten lines of changes caused by adding one line to a big list of imported symbols/functions.",
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"body": "I was hoping that this would talk more about the logic behind generating a diff, rather than the optimisations involved in rendering the text. IMO (as someone who doesn't have to deal with the actual rendering) it would go a bit deeper into talking about deciding how to show what has changed. There's a lot of improvements that could be made there. e.g. \"whitespace has changed here\" so there's no real code changes involved. Or \"this big list of imports has changed, and code formatting has line-wrapped the list into different lines\" - gitlab for example copes poorly with this. I'd love to just see a clean diff that highlights the additional import, and not just ten lines of changes caused by adding one line to a big list of imported symbols/functions.",
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"raw_body": "I was hoping that this would talk more about the logic behind generating a diff, rather than the optimisations involved in rendering the text.<p>IMO (as someone who doesn't have to deal with the actual rendering) it would go a bit deeper into talking about deciding how to show <i>what</i> has changed. There's a lot of improvements that could be made there. e.g. "whitespace has changed here" so there's no real code changes involved.<p>Or "this big list of imports has changed, and code formatting has line-wrapped the list into different lines" - gitlab for example copes poorly with this. I'd love to just see a clean diff that highlights the additional import, and not just ten lines of changes caused by adding one line to a big list of imported symbols/functions.",
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"text": "I disagree with the theory that scrolling frame rate doesn't need to be smooth for scrolling to feel smooth.<p>On mobile it kinda does. Scrolling diffs on mobile just kinda feels crap.<p>I have been spoiled by years of engineer hours spent getting scrolling to be 60- or even 120Hz smooth to match my finger, and diffs just.. isn't.<p>I know this is frustrating to hear, and that this is technically compounded by mobile probably having the lowest device performance to be playing with too, but.. There you go.",
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"body": "I disagree with the theory that scrolling frame rate doesn't need to be smooth for scrolling to feel smooth. On mobile it kinda does. Scrolling diffs on mobile just kinda feels crap. I have been spoiled by years of engineer hours spent getting scrolling to be 60- or even 120Hz smooth to match my finger, and diffs just.. isn't. I know this is frustrating to hear, and that this is technically compounded by mobile probably having the lowest device performance to be playing with too, but.. There you go.",
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"text": "I was hoping that this would talk more about the logic behind generating a diff, rather than the optimisations involved in rendering the text.<p>IMO (as someone who doesn't have to deal with the actual rendering) it would go a bit deeper into talking about deciding how to show <i>what</i> has changed. There's a lot of improvements that could be made there. e.g. "whitespace has changed here" so there's no real code changes involved.<p>Or "this big list of imports has changed, and code formatting has line-wrapped the list into different lines" - gitlab for example copes poorly with this. I'd love to just see a clean diff that highlights the additional import, and not just ten lines of changes caused by adding one line to a big list of imported symbols/functions.",
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"text": "I disagree with the theory that scrolling frame rate doesn't need to be smooth for scrolling to feel smooth.<p>On mobile it kinda does. Scrolling diffs on mobile just kinda feels crap.<p>I have been spoiled by years of engineer hours spent getting scrolling to be 60- or even 120Hz smooth to match my finger, and diffs just.. isn't.<p>I know this is frustrating to hear, and that this is technically compounded by mobile probably having the lowest device performance to be playing with too, but.. There you go.",
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