How to Review Pull Requests in VS Code (2026)

Why review PRs in VS Code? The GitHub and GitLab web interfaces are fine for small pull requests. You open the diff, scan a few dozen lines, leave a comment, and approve. But the moment a PR grows beyond a hundred lines or touches unfamiliar code, the web browser becomes a constraint rather than a tool. You cannot jump to a function definition. You cannot search across the full codebase for other callers of a modified function. You cannot run the test suite against the changed code. You cannot set a breakpoint and step through the logic to verify that an edge case is handled correctly. VS Code eliminates every one of those limitations. When you review a pull request inside VS Code, you get the full power of an IDE applied to the review process. IntelliSense shows you type information and function signatures as you read through changed files. Go-to-definition lets you trace a function call to its implementation in a single click. Find All References shows you every place in the codebase