Building levi
How I built levi, a small and fast git diff viewer in Rust, with Claude Code: from an empty repository to its first releases in under two days, and on from there, session by session.
levi is a terminal git diff viewer that does one thing: browse the commits on a branch, the files each one touched, and their diffs, with fzf-style search on top. I built it with Claude Code. These 2 posts follow the build in the order it happened: the decisions, the benchmarks, and how the agent and I worked together.
2026
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Building levi: A Small, Fast Git Diff Viewer in Rust, Written with Claude Code
Why I built levi, a terminal git diff viewer with fzf-style search, the design decisions behind it, and how I built it with Claude Code from a written plan.
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Building levi, Night One: From First Commit to 0.1.0 in 90 Minutes
The first session of building levi with Claude Code: parsing git log as a stream, a three-pane TUI on stderr, background loading, fuzzy search on every core, and CI.