tony

Your AI wrote the code. tony explains what now exists.

tony is a CLI that turns a git diff into a review page for the person who now owns the code — often someone who didn't type a line of it. Not a linter, not a code-review gate: it builds your mental model of the change, fast.

Every review page has three tabs:

1. File changes — the diff per file, with plain-language annotations sitting inline above the lines they explain. Modified code gets Prev / New / Changes panes; line numbers are computed from the diff, never trusted to the model.
2. Blast radius — files the change reaches that are not in the diff, each consumer classified breaks / behavior-change / compatible, shown at the affected lines.
3. How it works — steppable runtime walkthroughs. One concrete scenario ("you run export --resume after a crash") traced step by step, showing the real source lines read from your disk, a small state table, and one plain sentence per step.

Install

curl -fsSL https://tony-cli.com/install.sh | sh

or, if you already use uv or pipx:

uv tool install tony-cli     # or: pipx install tony-cli

Either way you get a tony command on your PATH.

Use

cd your-repo
tony main...my-branch        # review a branch against main
tony                         # review the default branch...HEAD

Reviews stay on your machine. The page is written to .tony/ inside the repo (gitignored automatically) and opens in your browser — one self-contained HTML file, fonts and styles and data inlined, so it works offline and forever. Nothing is uploaded; the only thing that leaves your machine is the diff tony sends to Anthropic to write the review.

tony needs an Anthropic API key (ANTHROPIC_API_KEY, or ~/.tony/.env). The first run tells you exactly where to get one and where to put it. tony reviews committed work: it shows code straight from disk, so the working tree must match the revision under review.

Every command and flag is listed under Commands.

Commands

tony --help prints this list. Everything below works from anywhere inside a git repo unless noted.

Reviewing

tony                          # default branch...HEAD, in the current repo
tony main...my-branch         # an explicit range
tony my-branch                # shorthand for my-branch...HEAD
tony ../other-repo main...x   # any path inside another repo

The range is git's own BASE...HEAD syntax. With no range, tony diffs against origin/HEAD — what the remote calls its default branch — falling back to main, then master.

Managing tony

tony uninstall takes --yes (-y) to skip the confirmation and --no-scan to limit it to the current repo instead of searching your home directory.

Both tony update and the installer resolve from PyPI explicitly, so a machine pointed at an internal mirror can't decide what tony-cli is.

Uninstall

tony uninstall

Removing the package by itself would leave the parts worth removing: your ANTHROPIC_API_KEY in ~/.tony, and a .tony/ directory of past reviews inside every repository you ran tony in — those hold source code. tony uninstall lists everything it found, waits for you to type yes, deletes it, then removes the package with whichever of uv, pipx, or pip installed it.

It searches your home directory for stray review directories; --no-scan limits it to the current repository, and --yes skips the prompt.

Development

pip install -e ".[dev]"      # the CLI, with pytest
python -m pytest             # the deterministic layer's tests
cd web && npm install
npm run build:viewer         # rebuild the renderer bundle the CLI embeds
npm run dev                  # the site; /dev renders src/fixtures/review.json

Two flags exist only for this loop, and only work from a source checkout:

There is exactly one renderer — web/src/renderer/render.ts — used by both the local page and the hosted site. The Python side decides all layout facts (line numbers, spans, added/changed tags) in src/tony_cli/layout.py and ships them in the payload; the renderer never re-derives them. DESIGN.md is the visual contract.

The site deploys to Vercel and needs DATABASE_URL (Neon Postgres), BLOB_READ_WRITE_TOKEN (Vercel Blob), and GITHUB_CLIENT_ID (an OAuth app with device flow enabled).