ReviewBudget
Turns an agent-authored diff into a plain-English 'about 12 minutes of careful review' estimate.
Price: $9 one-time
Included free
- Local diff complexity score (lines, files, cyclomatic delta, hotspot touch)
- Review-minutes estimate in the diff view
Unlocked with a license
- Team rollup of estimated review-minutes across open PRs
- vscode.lm-refined estimate that reads the diff's actual intent (planned; see note below)
Getting a license
Open the ReviewBudget sidebar (activity bar icon) and click Get License. After purchase you'll receive a license key — paste it into the sidebar and click Activate License. Keys are machine-locked; use Move to another machine… in the sidebar before reinstalling on a new device.
How scoring works
The diff is read by shelling out to git diff --stat/git diff --name-only/git diff against HEAD in the workspace root. Complexity delta is a simple regex count of branching keywords (if, else if, for, while, case, catch, &&, ||) on added vs. removed lines — a rough proxy, not a real cyclomatic-complexity parse. The score is filesChanged*3 + linesChanged*0.1 + complexityDelta*2 + (touchesHotspot ? 20 : 0), and the minutes estimate is max(2, floor(score / 5)). The licensed "Team Rollup" is genuinely just your own review-minute history on this machine (stored locally), aggregated into daily/weekly totals — there is no backend to sync across a team yet.
v2 stretch: vscode.lm-refined estimate
The regex-based complexity delta above is what ships today. A further step — sending the diff to a language model via vscode.lm to judge the change's actual intent (e.g. "mechanical rename" vs. "new branching logic") and refine the minutes estimate accordingly — is intentionally not implemented in this version. It's called out here as an honest roadmap item, not a shipped feature: it needs model-access consent flow, prompt design, and a graceful fallback when no model is available, all of which are future work.
