I've been building a tool I want to share with you. It's called Preflight and it does one thing: reviews your code changes before you push.

First thing that irriated me about this is that I'd open a pull request and then either have a Copilot or a reviewer point out stupid things that I should have caught myself before pushing. The feedback is valid in most cases, but the development loop is slow.

The second thing was filling out the PR template -- deleting and removing the boilerplate text, writing the summary, picking the change type(s), writing a changelog entry, etc. Definitely something an LLM could help with.

Anyway, that's how I ended up building Preflight.

What Preflight Does

Preflight is a VSCode extension backed by a lightweight backend and it has basically two features.

When you click "Review Changes", it:

1. Computes the diff between your branch and main (locally)
2. Sends the diff to the server, which runs it through an LLM (Claude by default, but others can be easily supported)
3. Returns structured feedback — categorized by severity and type, as well as a summary of the changes

The results show up in three places simultaneously:

• Inline in the editor — colored line highlights with hover details
• Problems panel — standard VSCode diagnostics with squiggly underlines
• Sidebar panel — a summary view with score, grouped issues, and click-to-navigate

Each issue includes a severity (error, warning, info), a category (bug, security, performance, quality), a description, and — when applicable — a suggested fix.

The key thing is that this happens before you push anything. You fix the issues, run the review again, and Preflight automatically detects which issues were resolved and which are still open. The history persists across sessions, so you don't lose track of anything.

The second feature is PR summary generation. If your team uses a PR template, Preflight finds it in your repo, reads your diff and commit log, and fills in each section. You get an editable preview — tweak it, copy it, paste it into GitHub.

No more staring at a blank PR description trying to summarize three days of work.

What I'm Looking For

I want to test this with real users on more than one codebase. If this sounds like something you'd use, I'd love for you to try it out.

I'm especially interested in:

• What kinds of issues it catches (or misses) on your codebase
• Whether the PR summaries match your team's expectations
• Rough edges in the workflow