Animate the change before reviewing it

When my PRs get large, I find it a little tedious to review how a call went through the various architectural layers. I find myself asking questions like:

• What files were changed?
• Were the changes made to the right modules?
• What function names were introduced or modified?
• Where’s the complexity hidden?

Answering these questions helps me figure out what I might look at next. Reading diffs to figure things out felt too much detail too early. The entire system isn’t in my head, so I need to map the relevant part in my head so I can make sense of the diffs.

I wanted to visualize that wrote a skill called flow-video. Here’s what it produced for a feature where a performer answers a booker’s questions when they claim a spot on a show:

I like using the sequence diagram as a starting point and then zooming in on each call to see it in the context of the larger system. Peeking at method signatures, function parameters, following return values, and seeing where infrastructure is touched in a call is a good starting point for me.

You can pass the skill a PR or just tell it to review your uncommitted changes, or something else and it’ll map it for you.

It’s built on the Hyperframes pr-to-video skill so you get some good PR feedback for free.