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Mode · story

Let the agent walk you through the diff.

Organize the diff around themes that belong together — not chronological file order — so the important work surfaces first. Crit opens a chaptered narrative overview so you understand what happened before you dig into lines.

  • Chaptered overview
  • Branch / PR / MR / range
  • Diff toggle
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How it works.

  1. 01

    Ask for a story

    After crit install <tool>, run /crit-story on a branch, PR, MR, or range.
  2. 02

    Agent authors chapters

    The agent groups the diff into a prologue and thematic chapters, with a dedicated support bucket for incidental noise — formatting, lockfiles, generated files.
  3. 03

    Crit opens the story rail

    Each chapter renders as its own section with commentary and the relevant excerpts — a narrative, not a raw diff dump.
  4. 04

    You review and comment

    Read chapter by chapter to understand intent, and leave line comments as you go — comments work in story mode. Toggle to Diff when you want the raw hunks.

What you get.

  • Thematic chapters

    The diff is grouped by intent, not by file path. A feature, a refactor, and a bugfix in the same branch become three separate chapters.

  • Prologue sets the scene

    A short prologue chapter states what the branch is trying to do before you read a single hunk.

  • Support bucket for noise

    Formatting-only changes, lockfile bumps, and generated files land in a dedicated support bucket instead of cluttering the narrative chapters.

  • Works for branch, PR, MR, or range

    Point it at a local branch, a GitHub PR, a GitLab MR, or an arbitrary commit range — the story is built from the diff, not the hosting platform.

Token cost.

Generating a story is LLM-driven exploration: your agent reads the diff prep, may open related source, and writes the chapters. That spend is on your agent's model — Crit does not bill for stories. Cost tracks how complex and multi-theme the change is (and how much the model explores), not a simple file or line count. It does not scale linearly with diff size. In our experience, complex PRs (~20–50 files, ~2k–5k lines changed) cost about $1–$1.40 with Claude Opus 5 via /crit-story.

Change size What that usually means Rough LLM spend
Mid-size ~10 files, hundreds of lines — one or two themes. Often around ~$0.40
Large ~20 files, ~2k lines changed — multi-theme. Often around ~$1–$1.40
Very large ~50 files, ~5k lines changed — many hunks. Still often ~$1–$1.40; exploration depth matters more than raw size

Measured as in-session /crit-story with Claude Opus 5. Session/project context (agent docs, skills, tools) is a separate baseline on top of story work.

5-second install.

Single binary. No account, no config, no dependencies.

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$ brew install crit

Or download a pre-built binary from GitHub Releases.

Other review modes