Understand the pull request before you read the diff.

Gnosis is an ancient Greek word for knowledge — not the surface kind, but the deep, direct understanding of a thing. The Gnostics used it for insight that comes from within, from truly comprehending something rather than just observing it from the outside. That's what's missing from most code reviews: you see the diff, but you don't get the understanding. Gnosis tries to close that gap.

Download for macOS View on GitHub

Code never leaves your machine. Reviews run against the Claude Code CLI you already have installed. No servers. MIT licensed.

Gnosis review overview — slide-numbered chapters, risk badges, and a serif title in a paper-coloured monograph layout.

The premise

We've gotten fast at writing code. Reviewing it hasn't kept up. Pull requests are still reviewed the same way they always have been — scrolling through file diffs in whatever order GitHub decides to show them, with no grouping, no context, and no sense of which changes depend on which. It works, but it's slow, and it's easy to miss things.

You paste a PR URL; Gnosis reads the diff, groups related changes, and presents them as an ordered slideshow. Foundation changes first, then the features built on top, then tests and config. Each slide has a short explanation of why the change exists, the relevant diff, and optionally a diagram. The goal is to walk you through the change the way the author understands it, not the way the filesystem happens to order it.

You read context before consequences.

Read it like a paper.

Reviews open as a guided slideshow — narrated, ordered, and grounded in the diff. Each slide explains why something changed before it shows you what changed.

Guided slideshow. Changes are grouped by theme and ordered by dependency — foundations first, then implementations, then tests and config — not by filename. Toggle between split and unified diff layouts at any time.
Risk assessment. Each review is rated low, medium, or high risk based on what changed. Critical slides — auth, data integrity, public APIs — are flagged so you read them with sharper eyes.
Mermaid diagrams. Slides can include sequence, flowchart, and class diagrams when the change benefits from a picture. Click to open fullscreen.

Targeted things to check.

Every slide ends with two to four "What to check" prompts grounded in the actual code. Each one is a specific question — not a generic checklist item — anchored to a file and line.

Anchored review checks. Click a check to scroll to the exact line it's about. Tick each one as you verify it — marks persist across restarts and update cleanly when the PR gets new commits.
Copy as agent prompt. A small icon next to each check copies a ready-to-paste prompt for Claude Code, Cursor, or any other agent — including the slide title, PR URL, and file:line so the agent can investigate without further setup.
Inline GitHub comments. Add comments on specific diff lines and submit directly to GitHub as an approval, request for changes, or comment. No copy-pasting between tabs.

Aware of your project.

Gnosis reads more than the diff. It picks up the conventions the team has already written down — and lets you pull in extra context when the diff alone isn't enough.

Project Claude conventions. Reads CLAUDE.md and the .claude/ folder of the repo it's reviewing. Custom commands, agents, and skills the team has built become part of the reviewer's context — filtered to ones that signal review relevance, not generic dev tooling.
Education mode. Each slide can include short explainers for concepts the code assumes you already know — "Unit of Work", "CORS preflight", "idempotency key" — so you can follow along without breaking flow to look something up.
External context. Optionally let the model search framework docs on the web and query related GitHub state — issues, sibling PRs, file contents at other refs — through MCP. Sources are cited on the overview.
Steering. A fast model detects local file imports across languages — C#, Rust, Python, Go — beyond what regex catches in the JS/TS world. And every review accepts free-text instructions: "focus on security", "explain the auth flow", "assume I don’t know this domain". The model treats them as authoritative.

Workflow that fits the day.

You shouldn’t have to babysit a review. Gnosis runs in the background, wakes you when reviews are ready, and remembers everything you’ve already worked through.

Proactive mode. Watches your PRs, assigned reviews, and any repos you pin. Reviews are ready in the Archives when you open the app, regenerated whenever a PR gets new commits — with a stale-review banner showing what changed. A menu-bar tray surfaces pending reviews and CI status without opening the window.
Background generation. Submit a review and keep working. Generation streams in the background, multiple reviews run in parallel, and the app can stay closed — work resumes when you reopen.
Slide chat. Ask follow-up questions about any slide in an inline resizable side panel. Highlight code in the diff to ask about that exact snippet, no copy-paste needed.

Local-first by design.

Your code stays on your machine. Reviews run against the Claude CLI you already have installed. There is no Gnosis server in the loop.

Claude-native. Claude Opus 4.7, Sonnet 4.6, or Haiku 4.5. Switch per review, or set different defaults for manual vs. proactive runs. Extended thinking available when the diff warrants it.
Smart context curation. Trivial changes — whitespace, import reordering, boilerplate — get filtered out. Generated artefacts like lockfiles and bundles are excluded automatically. The model’s context goes to changes that actually matter for review.

Get it

Download for macOS View on GitHub

Or via Homebrew: brew tap oddur/gnosis && brew install --cask gnosis

Getting started

From clean install to first review in about five minutes.

01 Install the Claude CLI. Gnosis uses Claude Code — install it once, then run claude auth.
02 Install Gnosis. Download from the releases page above, or brew tap oddur/gnosis && brew install --cask gnosis
03 Sign in and paste a PR URL. First launch opens a GitHub OAuth flow — or paste a PAT if your org blocks it. Drop in a PR URL and your first review starts in seconds.

Reviews take 2–4 minutes the first time. After that, turn on Proactive mode and your team's PRs will be waiting when you open the app.