Agentic coding is making development and code review more efficient than ever – teams are shipping thousands of PRs in the time it would've taken to manually create a handful. With evals and verification, we're approaching an ideal world where 99% of PRs are written, evaluated, and reviewed entirely by agents.
But that last 1% – the 1% where we still want to personally experience how a new feature looks and feels before signing off on it – is where sidebranch lives. Sidebranch is a browser extension paired with a local sidecar daemon that lets you easily switch between git worktrees while your app is running locally, and compare different branches side by side within a dedicated diff shell. Your working tree, uncommitted changes and all, is never touched.
In-page branch switching Pick any branch from the pill and it builds in an isolated worktree on its own dev server.
🖥️ Side-by-side diffs Both panes live, plus blend and onion diff modes where UI changes are highlighted.
🧘 Framework agnostic Next, Vite, Django, Rails, everything supported as long as it answers HTTP on a port.
📦 Zero dependencies The entire tool is Node builtins, with no external packages or dependencies.
the "loopback-only, zero dependencies" pitch reads as the security answer, but the part I'd want to poke at before installing this on anything client-facing is the boundary between the browser extension and the sidecar daemon itself - if the daemon is listening on a local port to serve worktree switches and diffs, what stops any other tab or local process from hitting that same port and triggering a branch switch or diff against a repo it shouldn't touch? loopback-only keeps the internet out, it doesn't automatically keep other things on your own machine out.
Ah, just what I needed! I have been struggling on using agents for design, and having a visual diffing tool definitely helps!
I recently have this new workflow where I ask agent to build a functional mock on a separate project. I would like to have a way for agents to verify if they are building to the agreed mock spec visually. Does it support having agents to inspect between the diffs visually and by element tree, so agents can use it to figure out if it is building to spec?
loopback only w/ zero deps means no security convo before i put it on a client project. how many worktrees run at once before my laptop gives up
Onion mode is the bit I'd actually use. Comparing two branches isn't the hard part though, picking which screen to open is. We ship 111 one click flows and an agent PR can quietly move something on any of them, so what I need is a list saying these 4 pages changed visually, go look at those. If the sidecar can walk routes and flag the ones that moved, that's the version I'd install.
About sidebranch on Product Hunt
“Easy git-based visual diffing”
sidebranch launched on Product Hunt on September 4th, 2026 and earned 100 upvotes and 6 comments, placing #10 on the daily leaderboard. Review PRs from inside your running app: switch branches from an in-page widget and compare worktrees side by side. Loopback-only, zero dependencies.
sidebranch was featured in Productivity (660k followers), Developer Tools (518.8k followers) and Artificial Intelligence (477.8k followers) on Product Hunt. Together, these topics include over 359.4k products, making this a competitive space to launch in.
Who hunted sidebranch?
sidebranch was hunted by Cristobal graña. A “hunter” on Product Hunt is the community member who submits a product to the platform — uploading the images, the link, and tagging the makers behind it. Hunters typically write the first comment explaining why a product is worth attention, and their followers are notified the moment they post. Around 79% of featured launches on Product Hunt are self-hunted by their makers, but a well-known hunter still acts as a signal of quality to the rest of the community. See the full all-time top hunters leaderboard to discover who is shaping the Product Hunt ecosystem.
Want to see how sidebranch stacked up against nearby launches in real time? Check out the live launch dashboard for upvote speed charts, proximity comparisons, and more analytics.
Cristobal graña
Agentic coding is making development and code review more efficient than ever – teams are shipping thousands of PRs in the time it would've taken to manually create a handful. With evals and verification, we're approaching an ideal world where 99% of PRs are written, evaluated, and reviewed entirely by agents.
But that last 1% – the 1% where we still want to personally experience how a new feature looks and feels before signing off on it – is where sidebranch lives. Sidebranch is a browser extension paired with a local sidecar daemon that lets you easily switch between git worktrees while your app is running locally, and compare different branches side by side within a dedicated diff shell. Your working tree, uncommitted changes and all, is never touched.
In-page branch switching
Pick any branch from the pill and it builds in an isolated worktree on its own dev server.
🖥️ Side-by-side diffs
Both panes live, plus blend and onion diff modes where UI changes are highlighted.
🧘 Framework agnostic
Next, Vite, Django, Rails, everything supported as long as it answers HTTP on a port.
📦 Zero dependencies
The entire tool is Node builtins, with no external packages or dependencies.