| name | differ |
| description | Read reviewer comments created by the Differ macOS diff viewer. Use when working in a repository that may have Differ reviewer comments, when the user asks to check review comments from Differ, or when an agent needs to discover actionable feedback without copy/paste from the diff UI. |
Differ Reviewer Comments
Use this skill to read review feedback that a human left in Differ.
Locate The Comments File
Run this command from inside the target Git repository:
git rev-parse --path-format=absolute --git-path differ/comments.json
Read the returned path. If the file does not exist, there are no Differ reviewer comments.
The file is intentionally under Git-private storage, usually .git/differ/comments.json. It should not appear in git status, and it should not be committed.
Interpret The JSON
Expect a materialized JSON document:
{
"schemaVersion": 1,
"repositoryPath": "/path/to/repo",
"updatedAt": "2026-06-19T13:04:50Z",
"comments": []
}
Each comment has these important fields:
id: stable identifier for follow-up discussion.
revision: increments when the comment body or lifecycle state changes.
state: open needs attention; resolved is retained history.
body: the human review comment.
reference: human-readable file and line reference.
selection: structured file, old file, side, and line range.
snippet: optional fenced diff snippet captured when the comment was created.
placement: optional current render status.
Placement statuses:
mapped: Differ can currently anchor the comment to visible parsed diff lines.
unmapped: the related file is still in the working-tree changes, but the selected lines are not currently anchorable. The comment still needs attention if it is open.
stale: the selected file is no longer in the current working-tree changes. Treat open stale comments as review feedback that may have been addressed or displaced; verify before ignoring them.
placement.reason gives a compact machine-readable reason such as selected-lines-not-in-current-diff, diff-not-rendered, file-hidden-from-all-changes, or file-not-in-current-changes.
Agent Workflow
- Locate and parse the comments file.
- Focus first on comments where
state is open.
- Use
reference, selection, and snippet to find the relevant code.
- Do not discard open comments just because
placement.status is unmapped or stale.
- Treat
resolved comments as historical unless the user explicitly asks to review them.
- Do not edit
comments.json unless the user asks you to manage Differ comments directly.
Useful inspection command:
jq '.comments[] | select(.state == "open") | {id, reference, body, placement, snippet}' "$(git rev-parse --path-format=absolute --git-path differ/comments.json)"