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Comment by jeffbee | Hacker News Reader

Satisfaction with Critique among Xooglers is undoubtedly driven by dissatisfaction with GitHub PR reviews. GitHub reviews are astonishingly bad. The tool is utterly useless for actual reviews. After the first round of comments it becomes total chaos. Nobody can tell what's been said, done, changed, or resolved. It is impossible to believe that the people who write and maintain the GitHub PR tools have themselves ever practiced code review.

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I was on a team at Google that used both Critique and GitHub very heavily, so I was able to constantly see the side-by-side and understand the pain engineers faced when doing external code reviews (as a whole, people actually liked working on GitHub).

After I left I created CodeApprove (https://codeapprove.com) to bring a lot of Google's best code review practices to GitHub. It doesn't give you everything Critique did, but I think it brings the same speed, clarity, and focus in a way that's still compatible with the rest of your GitHub workflow.

This looks like a good tool, and I was tempted to try it, but it costs twice as much as GitHub itself, and I'm not sure it would give us twice as much value.

Honestly that’s fair because GitHub is very good and probably too cheap. If they doubled their prices tomorrow I wouldn’t even consider leaving.

What would you pay for CodeApprove? Also if you email me I’m happy to set you up with a 6-month free trial with no credit card required. Maybe you’ll like it more than you think!

> GitHub is very good and probably too cheap

Yeah, that's probably true, it's just that I'm getting subscription fatigue, with every little tool like "Google Meet links for Slack!" wanting $5/mo/user. I commented something similar upthread, but maybe "free for the first five users, $9/mo/user after" would be much more aligned with your customers' incentives, and would allow you to get a foothold in companies when they're small, and be paid as they expand.

I don't know yet what I'd pay, as I haven't tried it and don't know what value it gives me (it might well be worth the $9!). I'd appreciate a trial, I could send it around the company and see if it makes reviews less painful.

I get the same feeling when switching between Gitlab and Github. The latter is a joke of usability and discoverability.

Tiny details like thread filtering, thread replies not appearing as separate comments, "show changed lines" when a new commit modifies the subject of a comment, etc. Those add up to make gitlab much more usable.

It's funny, because GitLab feels pretty bad. It's slow, there are weird places where things require a full page reload, and it's extremely aggressive about hiding files that have significant changes (yes, small changes are better, but I still need to review big ones some of the time).

To be fair to GitHub, there has been slow but constant progress over the last few years. I would love it to get at some point to where Critique was when I left Google (almost 10 years ago).

I don't see any desire for them to actually improve it. It's been over a decade and the code you are actually reviewing is not even on the page of a PR. You have go to a separate web page to see it.

Agree with this. GitHub was good at some point, then Gitlab caught up and now Gitlab has been superior in code review experience for few years at least.

Comparing between MR/PR versions, meta commands in MR templates, and so on.

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