35 points ericholiveira 2 hours ago 21 comments
ericholiveira 2 hours ago | parent
AI agents now write a lot of our code, and AI reviewers catch a lot of the line-level problems. But someone still has to press "merge", and that person has the same question every time: how risky is this, and where should I spend my attention? A 40-file PR where 38 files are isolated is very different from a 3-file PR that changes a model used by 23 endpoints.
farol is a CLI (and a GitHub Action) that answers that statically:
- classifies the PR (global / touches-existing / isolated / unknown) and gives a 0-100 merge risk score - ranks the files by risk and says why: what each one reaches (routes, endpoints, jobs), contract breaks in API responses, dependency changes, security patterns - diff coverage from your existing coverage report, so "38% of the changed lines are tested" sits next to the risky files - an HTML report where you mark files as reviewed and the score and test plan follow; incremental mode for "what changed since my last review"; suggested reviewers from git blame
How: it uses the TypeScript compiler API for TS/React (React Router, Next.js, TanStack Router) and TS backends, a small go/types helper for Go, and Python's ast for FastAPI/Flask/Django and friends. No LLM, no network during analysis, and it never executes the analyzed repo's code. It's deterministic and informs only; it never blocks a merge.
Live demo (two reports from a real PR, nothing to install): https://winnin.github.io/farol/demo/
Try it on a branch: npx @winninjs/farol --help
Limitations: only TS, Go and Python for now, and the reachability is static, so dynamic dispatch and reflection make it fail closed ("unknown") rather than guess. I'd love feedback on the risk score and on false positives in your codebase.
ccvannorman 1 hour ago | parent
Trying to understand why the poster's own comment was flagged and killed but the original article remains up.
shiandow 1 hour ago | parent
rubyn00bie 1 hour ago | parent
BalinKing 1 hour ago | parent
alsiola 1 hour ago | parent
ericholiveira 1 hour ago | parent
fcarraldo 1 hour ago | parent
However, the backend demo report seems longer and more complex than just reading the code. I’m trying to build something similar as well, and no one has quite nailed this yet.
The risk map / assisted review needs to be succinct and information dense, to guide your attention. My current philosophy is that we need to be annotating code, not replacing the entire code review interface with a bunch of text.
ericholiveira 58 minutes ago | parent
munro 55 minutes ago | parent
But the example PR... It said code generate with Claude, is it really still this bad? Last I was using SQLAlchemy with Claude was Opus 4.5, and it took some heavy coaching and skill gen not to generate code like this--but why even use SQLAlchemy at all if you're just going to use string interpolation jeez
https://github.com/erich-oliveira-winnin/full-stack-fastapi-...
owner = "" if current_user.is_superuser else f"WHERE owner_id = '{current_user.id}'"
query = f"SELECT status, count(*) FROM item {owner} GROUP BY status"
rows = session.execute(text(query)).all()
Part of me thinks maybe because it's not popular or well documented, but SQLAlchemy has an eDSL of SQL, so you can skip the whole ORM/table mapping layer, and just use it to programmatically construct SQL syntaxbenglish11 49 minutes ago | parent
alex_suzuki 23 minutes ago | parent
Yes, this is called SQLAlchemy Core: http://docs.sqlalchemy.org/en/latest/core/
You can also just use psycopg (the Postgres driver layer) directly, it’s surprisingly ergonomic in my (limited) experience.
osigurdson 45 minutes ago | parent
I thought mono meant one.
messia 40 minutes ago | parent
timcobb 38 minutes ago | parent
There was a post here recently, "Using LLM for confidence scoring is a bad idea", my mind went immediately to using LLMs for scoring risk. Seems like a bad idea. If there's anything we still need a human for, it's assessing risk.
cowlevel 22 minutes ago | parent