Concepts

revu was built for the hardest version of PR review: contractors reviewing a client's private repos from disposable cloud workspaces, where every API call authenticates as one shared GitHub App and there is no github.com tab to fall back to. The constraints that came out of that setting are encoded in the product rather than smoothed over, and they turn out to make the general-purpose tool better too.

Six ideas carry the whole design. Each has a page:

• Snapshot — a PR is pulled down in one sync burst — diff, files, threads, commits, checks — then reviewed fully locally. The snapshot seal on every PR header dates what you are looking at: quiet when fresh, gold when the world moved under you.
• Compare key — immutable content is keyed merge_base...head, never head alone. Blobs are content-addressed and reused across syncs, and read from your local git object store, which is what keeps a large-PR sync cheap.
• Drafts — your review is a durable local draft, saved as you type and keyed to you. A restart loses nothing; a draft is deleted from disk only on confirmed submit success.
• Reconcile — when the branch moves under a pending draft, every comment is classified clean, drifted, or lost, and you decide each one explicitly. Nothing is ever silently discarded.
• Identity — in direct mode GitHub authenticates you for real. The shared-identity broker model — one GitHub App with per-human name stamping — is reserved, not shipped.
• Rate budget — the snapshot spends the shared GitHub rate budget once, in a burst, then review is local. Only the PR list keeps polling, and that is free on ETag 304s.

These ideas connect. A snapshot is keyed by its compare key; a draft outlives its snapshot; when a newer snapshot arrives with a different head, reconcile is how the draft crosses over. The rate budget is the reason the snapshot exists at all, and identity is what a stamped write carries. Read them in order, or jump to whichever surfaced a question.