November Changelog

Ask Macroscope Anything:

We upgraded Macroscope’s Slackbot with a few new capabilities:

• Jira and Linear Integration: Tag @Macroscope to create a ticket in Jira or Linear, and Macroscope will use the context provided to generate tickets on your behalf.
• Compare Changes: You can now ask Macroscope to compare commits between two SHAs, branches, or tags to see what changed.
• Productivity Metrics: The Slackbot can now query productivity metrics that are computed by Macroscope, such as number of commits, PRs, or coding time, across arbitrary time ranges. Simply ask questions like “@Macroscope how many PRs were opened in the last 2 days?”.

Merge Status and Notifications:

Macroscope now provides you context (and notifies you in-thread on Slack) when commits are merged into a release branch. This solves a regular pain point for engineering teams and product stakeholders who wonder “Did that commit get merged yet?”. You can use this in a few ways:

• On Slack: If you subscribe to commit summaries in a channel, Macroscope will react to commits with a emoji and respond in thread when those commits get merged to a release branch.
• On Web: Macroscope shows a “Released” tag on the commit, along with a detailed panel showing the lineage of the commit and when it got released. 

Executive Summaries:

Macroscope now generates an executive summary of what your team shipped. This summary is automatically updated multiple times per day on the Macroscope homepage and then gets delivered to your inbox as a weekly digest at the end of the week. This new executive summary has a few improvements compared to the previous project summaries:

• More focused on the largest chunks of work, rather than recounting every bit of development activity.
• More succinct and clear, intended to be read as a single executive summary for a product or engineering leader, rather than a highly technical list of bullets.
• More scalable, in that it can create useful and informative summaries for both 10-person engineering teams and 100+ person engineering teams alike. 

Code Review:

We’ve added improved capabilities to Code Review – including manual GitHub triggers, new rendering modes, and web research – plus many other optimizations to drive fewer false positives and higher bug detection.

• Manually Trigger Code Review in GitHub: You can now manually trigger a code review on a PR in GitHub by commenting “@Macroscope-app review”, regardless of whether Macroscope code review is enabled for the repository. Macroscope will acknowledge your comment with a and run code review on the PR.
• New Rendering Modes: Macroscope now automatically selects the best format for displaying suggested code fixes in review comments. Depending on the context, Macroscope chooses between three options:
  • GitHub’s native inline suggestion block, if supported by the diff
  • Unified diff blocks
  • No diff (i.e. text-only explanations)
• Web Research: In order to reduce false positives, Macroscope can now search the web using Parallel’s search API to find the latest documentation, so that code reviews take into account every library and package you use. In our testing, this meaningfully reduces the likelihood of false positives of code review comments relating to third party libraries.

We are relentlessly focused on catching the most bugs while minimizing false positives. In case you missed it, we released a public benchmark showing Macroscope’s performance along critical dimensions like bug detection and comment rate. (tldr, we catch more bugs than any other code review tool we tested).

We plan to release updated benchmarks over time, and internally focus on improving these benchmarks daily.

Loving Macroscope? Tag us @Macroscope on X , email contact@macroscope.com or reach out on Slack – we’d love to hear your feedback! 

Haven’t tried Macroscope yet? Try Macroscope free for 2 weeks.