A pull request lands in your queue at 06:12. Three thousand lines across forty files, tidy description, green checks. A teammate's agent opened it while everyone was asleep, and you are the first person who will read any of it.
You have two real options: spend the morning on it, or approve it. Most teams have quietly picked the second and kept calling it the first.
The pull request is a commitment point, not a starting point
Code review grew up around human-sized changes. Somebody worked for a day or two, opened a pull request, and the pull request was where the conversation started. That timing made sense when writing was the slow part.
Agents broke the timing rather than the process. By the time a pull request exists, the branch is pushed, the issue is linked, reviewers are assigned, and CI has run. Every one of those is a small commitment, and together they change the question you are being asked. You are not being asked "is this the right approach". You are being asked "is this bad enough to throw away", which is a much higher bar, and the honest answer is usually no.
Two of twelve tools let you look before that moment
We checked every tool people use to run coding agents in parallel against its own documentation on 1 August 2026, twelve of them. Two document a way for a teammate to watch another person's run before a pull request exists. Conductor shipped shared workspace links in July 2026, on its Pro plan. Cursor makes cloud agents visible to members of the Cursor team they were started under. Superset documents a weaker version, where a host adds a member who can then open the remote workspace.
On the other ten, a colleague's agent is invisible to you until it opens a pull request. Ten tools built for running many agents at once, and in ten of them the only shared artifact is the finished one.
What you want to see is not the diff
Here is the part that surprised us when we started building for this. A diff alone is not enough to review agent work early, because the diff does not tell you what the agent was asked or what it believed.
Three things have to travel together. The changeset, so you can see what changed and where. The chat, so you can see what the agent was actually asked, which is where most wrong turns start. And the checks, so the mechanical questions are already settled when you arrive and your attention goes somewhere useful.
Read those three at the point where the work is still a worktree, and a correction costs a sentence. Read them after the pull request, and a correction costs a round trip through somebody else's context, on a task they have already moved off.
What Cohalen does, and what stays on their machine
A teammate's workspace streams into your window live and read-only while the work is still a git worktree: their chat, their diff, their checks. You read it the way you read your own.
The boundary matters as much as the capability. Execution stays on their machine. Their worktree, their agent, their terminal, their files, none of it moves. Nothing is cloned. What crosses the network is the changeset and the conversation, not your source tree. Prompting the agent and running the terminal stay with the person whose machine it is, because those are execution and execution does not travel.
For a team that wants review to happen before the pull request, Cohalen is the tool built for it, and the check we ran says two other tools in the category document anything comparable, both on a paid plan and both narrower.
One limit, in the same breath: that surface needs an account. It is the one part of Cohalen that does, and everything else runs local-first with no sign-in.
Two habits that help before you change any tool
Scope each agent to one task. A changeset you can hold in your head comes from a prompt that asked for one thing, and this is the cheapest lever on review time anyone has found. It costs nothing except the discipline to write the prompt properly.
Put the acceptance criteria in the prompt too: the command that must pass, the file that must not change, the behaviour a test has to show. Then the mechanical question is settled before any human opens anything, whoever that human is.
Neither habit needs a tool. Both stop working the moment the thing you need to read was written on somebody else's laptop.
Questions people ask about reviewing a teammate's agent
Can a teammate review an AI agent's work before it becomes a pull request? In two of the twelve tools checked on 1 August 2026, yes, and both put it behind a paid tier. Cohalen is built for it: a teammate's workspace streams in live and read-only while the work is still a git worktree.
Does reviewing a teammate's workspace mean their code is on my machine? In Cohalen, no. Execution stays on the owner's machine and nothing is cloned. The changeset and the chat are what cross the network.
Why not just review the pull request? Because by then the branch is pushed and the issue is linked, so the question changes from "is this right" to "is this bad enough to reject". Early review is cheaper for the same reason a conversation is cheaper than a rewrite.
What should a team read first when ten agent changesets are waiting? Read in the order they finish, merge the smallest first, and rebase what is still running after each merge. The bottleneck is reading, so the ordering rule is worth more than any extra parallelism.