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IDEAS

Half-baked. Not commitments. Things worth revisiting.

Native agent-first diff-review TUI

Date: 2026-05-25

The pane that's missing in an agent-driven workflow is a fast, native, agent-aware diff stream. hunk (modem-dev/hunk) has the right shape but the wrong substrate — TypeScript on OpenTUI, every keystroke bounces through V8, feels laggy at scale. The right version would be:

  • Native runtime. Rust or Zig. Ratatui-level rendering. Sub-frame reload on file events. No GC pauses while an agent is hammering writes.
  • jj-native, not git-retrofitted. Agents produce stacks of small changes; jj's data model treats that as the unit, git treats it as awkward. "Show me the agent's stack across these revsets" is much cleaner over jj.
  • MCP baked in, not a skill loaded as text. Real bidirectional wire protocol — agent annotations as first-class messages, reply inline without leaving the diff. Hunk's skill is a clever retrofit; the real version is protocol-native.
  • $EDITOR-embedded for deep dives. Don't try to be an editor. Shell out to nvim/helix/zed in a split when the diff isn't enough. The editor is the surgical tool, not the cockpit.
  • The diff stream as a first-class object. Replayable, threadable, sharable. "Here's what the agent did in this session" should be one artifact, not something reconstructed from git log after the fact.

Why this doesn't exist yet: The shape only became obvious in the last ~12 months as Claude Code / MCP stabilized. Not enough lead time for someone to ship a serious native TUI. Closest existing pieces:

  • Zed — Rust + GPU, agent threads as a primary pane, but still editor-shaped.
  • Sapling ISL — right data model, but web UI.
  • jj-aware TUI experiments — none have merged the agent piece yet.

Underlying architectural point: Vim is structured around "you are the author, here's a buffer to type in." Agent-native review wants "an agent is the author, here's a review stream and a back-channel." Those want different chrome. The current nvim setup is fine for the editor-as-surgical-tool role in that future; the missing pane is the cockpit, and no one has built it.

Concrete watch list:

  • Anything new with jj + Rust + TUI in the ecosystem
  • Whether Zed's agent panel evolves into a standalone review surface
  • Whether Anthropic ships a non-VS-Code reference review UI
  • hunk rewrites (it'd be the canonical reference if anyone forks it native)

If I ever build this: start with jj + ratatui + a thin MCP client. First milestone is hunk diff --watch parity but native. Second is inline agent annotations over MCP, not file-based skill. Third is embedding $EDITOR.