Pulldog
A Mac application to keep your code reviews organized!
235 followers
A Mac application to keep your code reviews organized!
235 followers
Pulldog is a native macOS client for reviewing Github & Gitlab pull requests. Aggregate multiple accounts into one seamless inbox. Create smart queries to cut through PR noise. Review with Spotlight actions, Widgets, and on-device Apple Intelligence. No browser tabs — just focused, macOS-native code reviews. 🐶
Pulldog
Hi 👋, I'm Paul — welcome
For the past year, I’ve been working on something called Pulldog 🐶 — a macOS client to review your pull requests without switching to a browser everytime.
Pulldog connects to Github & Gitlab and gives you a single place to monitor everything. The idea is to simplify code review and leverage all macOS features (Spotlight, Widgets & Shortcuts, …) as much as possible for those tasks that are one important aspect of our developer job to build quality products.
→ Why I built it
(1) Git account/repositories explosions
As a Swift developer I often had to do code review on multiple repositories, the ones for my team app, the ones for libraries that gravitates over app(s). Those numbers increase if mono-repository are not part of the equation. I also contribute to some open source projects sometimes so I need to keep an eye on those as well. And I was a bit frustrated that in 2025, I had to either monitor my email(s) or jump from one Github account to another. Because in a perfect world you have one git account to contribute to all of this but in practice you may have a personal account, and a profesional account. You can even work sometimes on Github for perso and on Gitlab for work.
That's why Pulldog propose to aggregate all your accounts in one place like a mailbox and don't really think anymore about it.
(2) Mental overhead ?
Another painpoint I had was that even if in theory developers can assign reviewers to their pull requests, in practice many teams don't (humans … right ? 😅) and you have to check on a regular basis if something can be reviewed by you. Can sounds fair but in reality they're lots of noise in this process, the ones I already approved, the ones that are not on my scoped (in case of big team with feature teams), … So to address this, Pulldog propose to create "Smart queries" on your sidebar that enable you to create advanced folders that filters from all your connected git account(s).
Here's some "Smart queries" that I like but well it's on your hand 🤾:
Last chance to review | PR approvals > X AND pipeline status is "succeed"
Old PRs | PR created date > X week(s)
Today's PRs | PR created date > begin day AND PR created date < end day
Feature team's PR | PR author name matching X, Y or Z
Big PRs | PR status is open AND (deleted lines > X OR added lines > X)
Small PRs | PR status is open AND deleted lines < X AND added lines < X
Most discussed (Useful for tech lead or staff engineer) | PR comments count > X
Mines | PR author name matching X
Mines that failed | PR author name matching X AND pipeline status is "failed"
Reviewed by me | PR status is open AND Comment author name matching X
Opened today | PR created date > begin day AND PR created date < end day AND PR status is open
Merged today | PR created date > begin day AND PR created date < end day AND PR status is merged
Code reviews take up a huge chunk of a developer’s time and I wanted to make reviews feel frictionless as possible — accessible, fast, and pleasant to use.
Under the hood, it's powered by SwiftUI, AppKit and SwiftData. I opened a beta program few months ago and now launching it on the Mac App Store.
That’s how Pulldog was born 🐶
💻 Website
📦 Mac App Store
→ Other features to mention
🔔 Notifications: only subscribe to specific channels and to specific repositories and receive system notifications. No more email(s).
🧠 Review with Apple Intelligence (macOS 26+): On-device AI at no extra-cost that summarizes files and evaluates PRs locally — no code ever leaves your machine.
🔍 Spotlight Actions: run PR actions right from Spotlight like “merge my mergeables” or “rerun failed pipelines.”
🧩 Widgets: track reviews and team progress right from your Desktop or Notification Center.
🪄 Auto-commit filtering: instantly see what changed since your last review or approval.
🎨 Themes: 90+ themes & 185 languages supported.
🎭 Memojify mode: replace missing avatars with Memojis to make reviews a little more human.
🔍 Search: search and filter across diffs, filenames, and changed lines with regex.
and more …
Pulldog doesn't pretend to replace Github or Gitlab; it’s here to fit alongside them — but in a way that makes macOS feel like the best place to do your reviews 90% of the time.
I’d love to get your feedback & suggestions — whether you’re a dev lead, reviewer, or contributor. If something feels off or missing, please let me know. It’s still evolving every week, and your input can really shape where it goes next.
The multiple account aggregation is what sells me switching between personal and work GitHub accounts in the browser is one of those small frictions that adds up to a lot of wasted time over a week. Curious how it handles large PRs with hundreds of files changed, that's usually where native clients struggle because rendering diffs performantly is genuinely hard. Also wondering if the Apple Intelligence integration is actually useful for code review or more of a feature checkbox would love to know what it does in practice that speeds up your actual review workflow.
Pulldog
@zerodarkhub Yes, multiple account aggregation was also a big pain for me because as you say the reality is we have multiple accounts. Most companies have legitimate IT policies that creates a dedicated git account per employee even if this one already have one (personal). It can quickly create friction especially for freelancers that have many clients. Of course we can accommodate with it but I feel there could be a better way (btw I'm working on an Azure Devops integration in the next months) to really have a good market coverage (Github + Gitlab + Azure).
Regarding PRs with hundreds of files changed, it used a C library under the hood so you can deal with PRs that have thousands of files changed (even if in reality who review a 5k+ files change PR right 😅 ?, But it's a native app so let's get the most of our hardware!).
Regarding Apple Intelligence, for now Apple Intelligence APIs for developers (called Foundation Model APIs) have only access to local LLMs as far as I know with a 3B parameters, so to be 100% honest what's proposed by the local LLM is not really good right know for code suggestion. A.I file summary on the other hand is OK though (if you've reviewing a PR with mixed files that you're not mastering (like bash or shell) on a mainly Swift project for example).
At the beginning I thought about proposing a way for the user to choose (as many software(s) do) his own model using his own API key (Open A.I, Anthropic) in the Pulldog's settings. Let me know if it's something that may sounds interesting to you I may reconsider it. But with this moves privacy comes into consideration and there's also many companies that proposed bots for Github that post comments like Copilot or Code rabbit and well Pulldog will benefit from it (because, well, it displays those comments). So I abandoned such a feature.
So my bet for now is to trust Apple. They have hard time to ship an Apple Intelligence that works but as a developer I can already integrate the Foundation Model APIs (that's done) and may be later with macOS 27 or 28 Apple will give Foundation Model APIs access to what they call their "Private cloud" for A.I models with more parameters and Pulldog will be immediatly ready and privacy for source code should be respected too 👌
Finally someone built this. I manage PRs across multiple repos and the browser tab juggle is real. The Spotlight integration is what sells it for me -- being able to jump to a PR without context switching is huge. Do you support review actions directly in the app (approve, request changes, inline comments) or is it more of an inbox/triage tool that links back to GitHub?
Pulldog
@emad_ibrahim Thanks Emad! Yes you can interact with your pull requests (approve, request changes, comment, reply, react with emojies, set auto-merge, create, edit, close, re-rerun/cancel pipelines, review, set labels, set milestones).
Since macOS Tahoe you can even run actions directly from Spotlight (like re-run my failed pipelines, create a PR on repository X, …)
You can also leverage Apple Shortcuts to create mini-scenarios like "pick a random PR to review among the open ones", "Every day at 2 p.m try to merge PRs of mines that are mergeable (approved & pipeline succeed)" (*mergeability is defined in your repository's team project).
Really nice work Paul. As someone who manages multiple repos across our team, the noise from PRs you've already approved or ones that aren't even in your scope is a real productivity killer. Love that you built this as a proper native macOS app instead of yet another Electron wrapper. The Apple Intelligence integration for on-device PR summaries is a smart move too - keeping code local is a big deal for teams that care about security. One question - any plans to support Bitbucket down the road, or is the focus staying on Github and Gitlab for now?
Pulldog
@ben_gend Thank you for the feedback really appreciated! Yes indeed! I have other providers in mind from the start in a way that the code have an abstract layer to integrate more and more providers through time. I have a beta that already works with Azure (almost let's say 😅), Bitbucket is definitely on the list (I only read the docs API for now). Gittea & Beanstalk too after that. Roadmap & priority will depends on the community demands. Let's add +1 for Bitbucket if I understand well ! ☺️
Pulldog
@ben_gend Hello 👋, I've worked on a 1st beta that support Bitbucket. Would love to have you in the beta testers if still interested. I've sent you a message on LinkedIn.
If a team wants to migrate from browser-based reviews to Pulldog, which 3 adoption metrics would you track first to decide whether to roll it out broadly? (e.g., first-review response time, PR aging backlog, cross-repo context switches)
Pulldog
@hanxl Good question 🤔 I would say it depends of the viewer.
A manager will probably monitor "first-review response time" or "pull request lifetime opened → merged", "nbr of review per week" in case of high volume. Both are good indicators but having pull request opened for a long time is not necessary bad in every configuration 🤷♂️.
A developer on the opposite will probably wants to monitor "his mental overhead" (But this is a metric that is subjective and hard to track), "nbr of review he reviewed per repository" if these numbers increase then I guess cross-repo context switches have been improved.
Nice code review organization is genuinely underserved for solo devs and small teams. Curious whether you sync review notes or PR state to the cloud, or is everything stored locally on the Mac?
Pulldog
@avinash_matrixgard The app talks directly to Github & Gitlab (No Pulldog's server as middleware). So everything stored locally on the Mac.
Pulldog
@jay_song_dev Currently you can use "Cmd + space" to open Spotlight then just type either your review number, or some characters of the PR you search for.
Do you think to something else to jump between reviews ?