Baselines and branches

A baseline is the accepted screenshot of a story that the next capture is diffed against. A diff only exists relative to a baseline: without one, a story is new, not changed. Your very first build arrives as all new, and accepting it establishes the baselines.

Per branch. A pull request's baseline for each story is the most recent accepted screenshot in its git history - usually from your main branch. So your feature branch diffs against main, and you see only the changes your branch introduces, not the whole history.

Only when a change is accepted - by you in the dashboard, by your agent over MCP, or by a CI upload run with --auto-accept-changes. Accepting promotes the candidate screenshot to the new baseline for that branch. When the PR merges, its accepted baselines carry forward to main, and every branch that later branches off inherits them.

Usually because your change reaches that story indirectly: a shared component, a style, or a dependency the story imports changed on your branch. The diff is then real, and it is worth checking that the story still looks right. If nothing on your branch explains it, see the next question.

Usually not: most often your diff changed something the story renders indirectly, like a shared component, a global style, or a dependency. If you cannot trace the change to anything in your diff, look before you accept it rather than dismissing it as flake or re-running, because an accepted change becomes the baseline every later branch compares against.