General Offshoot Discussions

[NolanLT]

Welcome to Offshoot Discussions

Offshoot is a self-contained, local-only, PR-style checkpoint and diff review tool for VS Code. It's designed for people who want the benefits of pull requests and code review workflows without bringing in Git, remotes, or any external services.

What Offshoot is trying to solve

Most editors assume that real review happens somewhere else: in GitHub, GitLab, or a remote SCM. Offshoot flips that around and keeps everything on your machine, so you can:

• Create PR-like checkpoints as you code, without committing to Git.
• Review diffs in a focused, VS Code-native UI.
• Iterate quickly on experiments, spikes, or local branches that will never leave your machine.
• Use review workflows in environments where Git or network access is constrained.

The goal is to make small, reviewable steps a default part of your local workflow, not an extra chore reserved for remote repos.

How we'll use Discussions

This space is for project-level conversation rather than issue tracking:

• Announcements - Releases, breaking changes, and notable design decisions.
• Ideas and design threads - Proposals for how Offshoot should evolve (features, UX flows, naming, etc.).
• Workflow sharing - How you're actually using Offshoot day-to-day inside VS Code.
• Questions - Anything that doesn't fit cleanly into a single GitHub issue.

If you're not sure whether something should be an issue or a discussion, start here; we can always spin specific tasks out into issues once the idea is clear.

How to get involved

If you want to help shape Offshoot, a few good starting points:

• Describe the kinds of local workflows where PR-style checkpoints feel useful.
• Share friction points in the current UX and what "ideal" would look like in VS Code.
• Talk through integration ideas with other tools or extensions you already rely on.

To kick things off, feel free to reply below with:

• What kind of projects you work on.
• How you currently do local review or checkpointing (if at all).
• Where you think Offshoot could fit into or improve that workflow.

Thanks for taking a look, and welcome to the Offshoot community.