Ben Holmes Uses AI Agent to Generate Visual Code Explainers
Ben Holmes says he took Andrej Karpathy's advice and asked an AI agent for visual walkthroughs, which produced a before-and-after HTML explainer for a mobile caching PR. He says it helped him align on architecture before opening GitHub.
Original post · 1 min read
Here I asked for a before-and-after HTML explainer on a PR that adds caching to our mobile app. Opus 5.5 gave a step-by-step diagram of the new flow, screenshots, and pointed me to the code worth reviewing. No skills being used here; it just knew what to show.
Saved a lot of time and let me align on architecture before opening GitHub
Andrej Karpathy @karpathyWe'll be spending a lot more time trying to understand the outputs of language models. A few thoughts, tips & tricks:
Writing. Something I've had success with: Ask your LLM to explain something in ASD-STE100, it's a controlled language specification originally developed for aerospace maintenance documentation. LLMs well-versed in this language and it comes with heavy constraints on clean writing style that I often find a lot more readable. Sometimes I've tried to soften it a bit e.g. ask for "80% of the way to ASD-STE100" because the spec is quite stringent. But even better:
Diagrams / image…