Agentic coding is making development and code review more efficient than ever – teams are shipping thousands of PRs in the time it would've taken to manually create a handful. With evals and verification, we're approaching an ideal world where 99% of PRs are written, evaluated, and reviewed entirely by agents.
But that last 1% – the 1% where we still want to personally experience how a new feature looks and feels before signing off on it – is where sidebranch lives. Sidebranch is a browser extension paired with a local sidecar daemon that lets you easily switch between git worktrees while your app is running locally, and compare different branches side by side within a dedicated diff shell. Your working tree, uncommitted changes and all, is never touched.
In-page branch switching Pick any branch from the pill and it builds in an isolated worktree on its own dev server.
🖥️ Side-by-side diffs Both panes live, plus blend and onion diff modes where UI changes are highlighted.
🧘 Framework agnostic Next, Vite, Django, Rails, everything supported as long as it answers HTTP on a port.
📦 Zero dependencies The entire tool is Node builtins, with no external packages or dependencies.
Report
Ah, just what I needed! I have been struggling on using agents for design, and having a visual diffing tool definitely helps!
I recently have this new workflow where I ask agent to build a functional mock on a separate project. I would like to have a way for agents to verify if they are building to the agreed mock spec visually. Does it support having agents to inspect between the diffs visually and by element tree, so agents can use it to figure out if it is building to spec?
Report
loopback only w/ zero deps means no security convo before i put it on a client project. how many worktrees run at once before my laptop gives up
Report
Onion mode is the bit I'd actually use. Comparing two branches isn't the hard part though, picking which screen to open is. We ship 111 one click flows and an agent PR can quietly move something on any of them, so what I need is a list saying these 4 pages changed visually, go look at those. If the sidecar can walk routes and flag the ones that moved, that's the version I'd install.
sidebranch
Agentic coding is making development and code review more efficient than ever – teams are shipping thousands of PRs in the time it would've taken to manually create a handful. With evals and verification, we're approaching an ideal world where 99% of PRs are written, evaluated, and reviewed entirely by agents.
But that last 1% – the 1% where we still want to personally experience how a new feature looks and feels before signing off on it – is where sidebranch lives. Sidebranch is a browser extension paired with a local sidecar daemon that lets you easily switch between git worktrees while your app is running locally, and compare different branches side by side within a dedicated diff shell. Your working tree, uncommitted changes and all, is never touched.
In-page branch switching
Pick any branch from the pill and it builds in an isolated worktree on its own dev server.
🖥️ Side-by-side diffs
Both panes live, plus blend and onion diff modes where UI changes are highlighted.
🧘 Framework agnostic
Next, Vite, Django, Rails, everything supported as long as it answers HTTP on a port.
📦 Zero dependencies
The entire tool is Node builtins, with no external packages or dependencies.
Ah, just what I needed! I have been struggling on using agents for design, and having a visual diffing tool definitely helps!
I recently have this new workflow where I ask agent to build a functional mock on a separate project. I would like to have a way for agents to verify if they are building to the agreed mock spec visually. Does it support having agents to inspect between the diffs visually and by element tree, so agents can use it to figure out if it is building to spec?
loopback only w/ zero deps means no security convo before i put it on a client project. how many worktrees run at once before my laptop gives up
Onion mode is the bit I'd actually use. Comparing two branches isn't the hard part though, picking which screen to open is. We ship 111 one click flows and an agent PR can quietly move something on any of them, so what I need is a list saying these 4 pages changed visually, go look at those. If the sidecar can walk routes and flag the ones that moved, that's the version I'd install.