Vlad Niculescu

Hey StartupBase 👋 Vlad here, creator of PR Preview.

I built this because code diffs never tell you what actually changed on screen. You review a PR full of green and red lines, but you can't see the button that moved, the modal that now animates, or the flow that quietly broke. That gap only got wider once I started shipping AI-generated code — more diffs, less visual context, more "looks fine, merging" moments I'd regret later.

PR Preview is an open-source CLI that records clean before-and-after clips of your pull requests. It drives a real Chrome window through the user journey and exports a captioned MP4 (~0.6 MB) or GIF you can drop straight into the PR. No more manual Loom recordings or "works on my machine" screenshots.

The part I'm most excited about: it plugs into Claude Code via a built-in MCP server, so you can just describe a flow in plain English and let Claude drive the recording for you. Prefer to do it yourself? There's a manual click-through mode too. Everything runs locally — nothing gets uploaded.

The CLI is free and MIT-licensed, forever. A hosted "PR Preview for Teams" layer is coming next for collaboration features.

Would genuinely love your feedback — what would make this a no-brainer to add to your review workflow? And if you try it on a real PR, I'd love to see the clip. 🙏

— Vlad Niculescu

I think typing prompts makes more sense nowadays, but interesting idea anyways :D

Very nice. Good for prototyping with different models

Interesting, I am wondering how you manage third party application secrets and how you deal with this when using the chat interface to set up a connection.