dfft

dfft (short for “diff-trail”) lets you monitor changes as AI agents modify your codebase.

🤔 Motivation

I recently started to make use of agentic AI tools in my day-to-day workflows. While I like setting them off on their own to solve problems, every now and then I find myself needing to keep an eye on the changes introduced by them, either to see if they’re on the right track, or just because I’m curious about their approach. Most agentic tools will print the changes they make as they make them, but more often than not, the output gets scrolled out of view pretty fast. I wanted a fast and simple tool that would let me peruse the changes made by these agents at my own pace via a keyboard driven TUI.

dfft came out of my attempts at finding a good balance between letting AI agents operate freely and having control over every little change in my codebases. The hope is that the added transparency dfft provides helps me understand the process AI agents follow when implementing a change, and also lets me catch issues early.

💾 Installation

homebrew:

brew install dhth/tap/dfft

cargo:

cargo install dfft

Or get the binaries directly from a Github release. Read more about verifying the authenticity of released artifacts here.

⚡️ Usage

dfft run --help

Usage: dfft run [OPTIONS]

Options:
  -p, --path <PATH>     Path of the directory to watch (defaults to current directory)
      --debug           Output debug information without doing anything
  -f, --follow-changes  Start with the setting "follow changes" enabled
      --no-prepop       Skip prepopulating cache with file snapshots
      --no-watch        Start with file watching disabled
      --no-sound        Start with sound notifications disabled
  -h, --help            Print help

🔔 Notifications

By default dfft will play distinct sound notifications for each kind of change (CREATION / MODIFICATION / REMOVAL). You can toggle them on/off whenever needed. If you prefer to not use sound notifications at all, you can build a version of dfft that has no audio dependencies using the following.

cargo install --no-default-features dfft

📟 TUI

dfft’s TUI has 2 panes:

• diff: shows the diff for a change, or file contents for newly created files. Supports scrolling.
• changes: Holds the list of changes, with a label for each change

General

Diff Pane

Changes Pane

Help Pane

Ignoring files

By default, dfft will consider .gitignore and .git/info/exclude files when deciding which files to ignore. Additionally, you can create a .dfftignore file to exclude paths that are not covered by the previous two.

🔐 Verifying release artifacts

In case you get the dfft binary directly from a release, you may want to verify its authenticity. Checksums are applied to all released artifacts, and the resulting checksum file is attested using Github Attestations.

Steps to verify (replace A.B.C in the commands below with the version you want):

1. Download the sha256 checksum file for your platform from the release:

   curl -sSLO https://github.com/dhth/dfft/releases/download/vA.B.C/dfft-x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu.tar.xz.sha256
   

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2. Verify the integrity of the checksum file using gh.

   gh attestation verify dfft-x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu.tar.xz.sha256 --repo dhth/dfft
   

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3. Download the compressed archive you want, and validate its checksum:

   curl -sSLO https://github.com/dhth/dfft/releases/download/vA.B.C/dfft-x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu.tar.xz
   sha256sum --ignore-missing -c dfft-x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu.tar.xz.sha256
   

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4. If checksum validation goes through, uncompress the archive:

   tar -xzf dfft-x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu.tar.xz
   cd dfft-x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu
   ./dfft
   # profit!
   

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