Reviewing & committing

Updated 16 August 2026 · written next to the code it describes

Helmry never tells you whether an agent’s work is correct. “Ready for review” means the agent stopped. Everything below is about making the review fast enough that you actually do it.

While the agent works: the file-edit feed

In the conversation, each file the agent touches appears as a card — created, modified or deleted — with the change collapsed into something you can scan. It is produced on the server, not in your window, which has two practical consequences:

  • An agent you left working with no window open still has its feed waiting when you come back.
  • Two windows watching the same agent see exactly the same cards.

The feed follows the agent you are looking at. Nothing is scanned for an agent nobody is watching.

Two ways to review, and why the tab is sometimes missing

Diff & review (a Focus tab) exists only for an agent that owns its working tree — one launched with Isolated worktree. There, everything uncommitted in the tree is that agent’s work, so staging and committing under its name is honest.

For an agent working in your shared checkout the tab is absent by design: git status would mix its edits with every other agent’s and your own, and the commit would ship all of it. Review that work in the left rail’s Diff mode instead — the project-wide Changes view, per repo and branch, across every connected environment.

Reading a diff
File list Every changed file, with staged state
j / k Next / previous file
v Mark the current file viewed — the counter tells you how much of the staged work you have actually read
Unified / Split Toggle at the top of the diff
Re-read the workspace Forces a fresh scan if you changed something outside the app

Review all agents ready for review (from ⌘K) turns this into a queue: it walks agent by agent through their diffs, with Skip, Request changes (drops you into that agent’s conversation to say what is wrong) and Next.

The commit rail

On the right of Diff & review, four steps in order:

  1. Stage what you have reviewed. Click a file to stage it, click again to unstage.
  2. Write the message. Summary (imperative, ≤ 50 characters) plus an optional body. The ✨ button drafts one from the staged diff and your recent commits, so it matches the repo’s own style — edit it rather than trusting it. Optionally expand Commit onto a new branch to have that branch created and checked out when you commit.
  3. Commit — local and reversible. Nothing has left your machine yet.
  4. Push — the rail shows how many commits are ahead and pushes that branch. For a GitHub remote it then offers Open PR ↗, which opens the compare page in your browser.

Pushing is the first step that leaves the machine, and it is always an explicit click.

Artifacts

Agents can publish documents for you to look at — HTML or Markdown, up to 2 MB each — and they show up in the agent’s Artifacts tab with a badge count. Useful for a report, a table, a rendered mock-up: things that are the output of a task rather than a change to the repo.

Artifacts are durable server state, so they survive a reload and a restart, and they are refetched rather than replayed when a window reconnects.

What is not there

  • Line comments. The diff has no review-comment threads; use Request changes / the conversation.
  • Amend, rebase, cherry-pick, revert. Helmry does stage / commit / branch / push and nothing cleverer. Use git for the rest — the repo is right there in the console dock.
  • Merge conflict resolution. Same answer.