35 points ericholiveira 2 hours ago 21 comments

ericholiveira 2 hours ago | parent

Hi HN, I built farol at Winnin, where we open-sourced it (MIT).

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

why is the only comment by the OP flagged and dead? Is it because they were supposed to include that data in the description text rather than a comment, was it flagged as AI generated, or..?

Trying to understand why the poster's own comment was flagged and killed but the original article remains up.

shiandow 1 hour ago | parent

I'm not sure either. The comments don't look wrong to me.

rubyn00bie 1 hour ago | parent

You can vouch for it, if you view the comment by clicking the time since posted a “vouch” option appears. I did it. I’ve noticed this happening more and more on here for show HN posts especially. I’m not sure if it’s like some sort of troll gang or what…

BalinKing 1 hour ago | parent

AI-edited or -generated comments are disallowed by HN guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html#generated. I don't think any such restriction exists for submissions themselves, so that's my guess as to why the comment but not the submission has been flagged to death.

sikozu 1 hour ago | parent

I like the concept, a risk map could be useful in some circumstances but I absolutely hate the UI design; it reeks of AI with no human thought or care put into it.

ericholiveira 1 hour ago | parent

Thats is surely true... i did it with AI and i do lack design skills

looperhacks 1 hour ago | parent

Or you could, you know, read the changes your approving

y42 1 hour ago | parent

Sire, wouldst thou perchance elaborate upon this ancient, forgotten technique, long buried in the mists of antiquity and shrouded in mysterious lore?

alsiola 1 hour ago | parent

Looked at the backend demo, and the first lines suggested to look at were importing things. Exactly what I really don't need to be reviewing

ericholiveira 1 hour ago | parent

It suggested based on the files most used (through graph dependency), for this reason it appears as a important file (as if it breaks, it can break several places in your codebase), but that being said, you can add some files to be ignored (if you have special files, like consts or i18n)

fcarraldo 1 hour ago | parent

I think tools like this are needed and will become standard in the near future.

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

Thanks... it surely is possible to try to reduce the amount of information

munro 55 minutes ago | parent

IDK lot of noise in report, I need more signal to noise ratio, already reading so much AI output as it is.

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 syntax

benglish11 49 minutes ago | parent

That’s my favorite part of sqlalchemy. I don’t even use the orm anymore.

alex_suzuki 23 minutes ago | parent

> SQLAlchemy has an eDSL of SQL, so you can skip the whole ORM/table mapping layer, and just use it to programmatically construct SQL syntax

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

>> Claude Code lives in its own repository, separate from the monorepo

I thought mono meant one.

messia 40 minutes ago | parent

it's hard for me to imagine something made with so little taste can be any good...

timcobb 38 minutes ago | parent

This looks nice, but I would use it with caution.

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

Good idea. Do you take bribes to exclude certain lines from the risk map? Asking for my good friend Jia Tan.