Self-Review With AI Before You Open the PR — A Practical Workflow with branchdiff

You know the moment. You push the branch, open the PR, and immediately see it — the undefined return on the refund path, the token logged to the console, the TODO that was supposed to be temporary six weeks ago. The reviewer catches it four hours later and you reply "good catch, fixing now" as if someone else wrote that line. The first reviewer on most pull requests should have been the author. Half the comments you will receive — the missing null check, the untested error branch, the duplicate logic that could be extracted, the import that now goes nowhere — are things you would have caught with one more careful read-through. You skip that read because you have been in the code for two days and your brain completes the sentences for you. You see what you meant to write, not what is on the page. This post is about closing that gap with a structured AI-assisted self-review before the PR opens. Not to skip the human reviewer — to walk into the review with the obvious problems already gone, the test gaps already filled, and the PR description already written. So the reviewer's attention can land on what actually needs a second pair of eyes. The tool is branchdiff : a local browser app that runs your diff on localhost , stores everything in ~/.branchdiff/ , and keeps the AI surface controlled through an explicit branchdiff agent command API. Nothing leaves your machine until you decide to push it. Why "before the PR" is the right moment If you review after opening the PR, every AI fix becomes noise: a force-push, a re-read for your reviewer, another commit in the audit trail. If a teammate is already mid-review when you discover the bug, you look careless. The patch that should have been in the original push becomes a distraction for everyone downstream. If you review before opening the PR, the AI's output is a private workspace. You act on what matters, commit the fixes into your own history (often as fixup! commits you squash before pushing), and the PR that goes up i