February 11, 2026
Commit to the chaos
Flirt: The Native Backend
Flirt wants commit‑by‑commit reviews — Git folks cheer, pull‑request fans rage
TLDR: Flirt’s Git-based review tool is nearly working and pushes commit-by-commit reviews over big pull-request diffs. The crowd is split: purists cheer the discipline, while others want their all-in-one views and nitpicky comment tools. It matters because it could reshape how teams discuss and ship code.
New tool alert: Flirt is trying to reinvent code reviews by focusing on one commit at a time, and the internet is split like a bad merge. The dev says the Git‑native backend is “mostly there,” with reviews stored and shared via Git itself. But the real spark? Flirt plans to ditch comments on the full combined diff (the big change view many pull‑request lovers live in) and skip ultra‑precise “comment on a character range” features. Cue the drama.
Old‑school reviewers cheered the commitment to per‑commit discipline, while GitHub die‑hards fired back with “Don’t take my big diff away!” vibes. Gerrit fans (a tool popular with hardcore reviewers) poked the bear: why no character‑range comments? The author argues most folks don’t need it, suggesting clearer writing instead—turns out Markdown etiquette is suddenly a plotline.
Community color kept it spicy. One commenter winked at the cheeky domain name (“Flirt, really?”), another loved the concept but roasted the demo’s slow typing. And someone dropped a now‑iconic scenario: the dreaded “add missing semicolon” change, which reignited the eternal debate over force‑pushing and amending history. Hot takes flew, memes blossomed (“Commit to the relationship, not the thread”), and everyone wondered how Flirt will bridge GitHub’s quirks with its strict, commit‑first vibes. Read the announcement if you dare—this one’s pure review culture war
Key Points
- •Flirt’s December–January roadmap targeted a cross-backend feature specification and a Git-native implementation.
- •The Git-native backend is not feature-complete, but storing/sending/receiving review data via a Git remote works.
- •Flirt analyzed GitHub, mailing lists, and Gerrit; GitLab and Forgejo are considered similar to GitHub for future support.
- •Flirt plans to disallow commenting on combined diffs of multi-patch series, focusing on per-commit reviews and handling full-diff comments via fallbacks.
- •Flirt will support line-range comments and commit message/header comments; character-level range comments won’t be supported, and GitHub commit-message comments will be represented as free-standing comments.