Introducing Stage
Our mission and what inspired us to build a new code review platform.
Why are we doing this?
When I was an early engineer at Yuzu Health in the end of 2025, agentic coding started really taking off.
Everyone on our eng team got more productive seemingly overnight and we were building new features faster than ever. Sounds great for a small startup right?
But then we looked at our GitHub stats and surprisingly found — we were actually shipping these features slower than before.
It turns out that despite being able to implement things faster, the code review process quickly became the bottleneck to getting them out to our end users. PRs would pile up in our backlog for weeks, and overwhelmed we'd resort to glancing things over and rubber stamping them.
Dean and I wondered — if AI could help us write code exponentially faster, why couldn't it help us review code faster as well?
What problem are we solving?
Not only are teams opening PRs faster than ever, but they're getting larger and harder to review. And GitHub's UI hasn't changed in over a decade, and it feels like code review is slowly dying.
We don't think it has to be this way.
We want Stage to be the best code review platform built for developers, by developers.
We're starting off by redesigning the code review process around the way you naturally think, allowing you to not only review PRs faster but with a better understanding of what's actually changing.
Are we building a code review bot?
No, we intentionally decided not to build one.
While these tools are excellent for catching surface level bugs (and we use them ourselves!), they lack the context needed to make high level, subjective design decisions that only a human has.
And at the end of the day, humans are still responsible for what gets merged in the codebase.
So with Stage we're really focused on making human code reviews as easy as possible, so teams can ship faster without sacrificing understanding.
Try it out today!
We're still in the early days but we're super excited to keep building. If you're drowning in code review and are also tired using GitHub, give Stage a try and tell us what you think: stagereview.app.