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Posted by cosmtrek 13 hours ago

Show HN: Mindwalk – Replay coding-agent sessions on a 3D map of your codebase(github.com)
138 points | 61 comments
tikimcfee 5 hours ago|
Hey OP, this is absolutely awesome and I am very much on your creative wavelength! I'd love to get in contact with you if you have a moment, as I've built an adjacent 3D visualizer that might complement the rendering portion of your system by providing actual glyph-level rendering of each file instead of block-based representations (glyph3d.dev). I have a similar "trace" feature that shows files pre/post edit from CC at the moment, so there is some definitely interesting overlap.

Well done creating A Cool Thing!

cosmtrek 3 hours ago||
Glyph3D looks cool! I'll look into it and give it a try as soon as I can.
tikimcfee 35 minutes ago||
Cheers to ya! The rendering library is separate from the app itself, so I can help push that around if ya want a better handle to play with it.
4b11b4 3 hours ago||
looks cool but a little rough. If you had another 3d scene how would you integrate this?
tikimcfee 35 minutes ago||
Little rough is putting it generously haha, and thanks for checking it out anyway!

This is a standard three.js implementation with just some fancy shaders and loading primitives. If you looked at the IDE demo, that's basically the test bed I use for rendering. The library is available in NPM (I can update to latest this evening if you'd like to pull it that way) and it's meant to be composable, as are the app tools and field abstractions.

My hope is that it means import as a dep, call into the bootstrap, and then you can place a "glyph field" node wherever ya want and stream text and buffer updates to it.

alansaber 7 hours ago||
A lot of people want a use case. One I think might be cool is some kind of spatial/represented comparison: let's see how two different models interact with the codebase (for the same problem), what they touched, and what they did. Or the same model, but averaged across 100 runs, so we can see how much variance there really is per task. Something along those lines sounds interesting to me.
sdesol 6 hours ago||
> A lot of people want a use case.

I think the issue is, on the surface this is very much a "watch this non-deterministic actvity" but I can see the value in it. This is self promotional but I am working on a "Brain" (https://github.com/gitsense/pi-brains) for the Pi (https://github.com/earendil-works/pi) coding agent and I can actually see this being quite useful to quickly tell if you did make an agent smarter or not.

There is obviously different ways you can do this, but I can see being able to quickly visualize changes based on additional knowledge/constraints can be quite useful.

alansaber 6 hours ago||
I'd advise you to put a video demo at the top of your repo, similar to OP, to convince or interest me.
sdesol 5 hours ago||
There are some additional things I need to implement first but I do have a hands on repo that you actually try at

https://github.com/gitsense/gsc-rules-demos

One of the rules shows how you can inject information when you know an agent wants to read a certain file. So if you have skills related to a certain file/directory, you can inject the information when you need to.

So using the OPs visualization tool, if you find the agent wandering you could create a new rule to guide the agent and compare it with and with guidance.

cosmtrek 7 hours ago||
Thanks bro, you see the value of this project!
cududa 10 hours ago||
This is really cool! I’m becoming convinced the optimal UI to engage with agents, long term is going to be something spatial. No idea shape that even takes, though I really feel what you’ve made might be Xerox PARC days in terms of metaphor maturity, but there’s some real new seeds of “obvious in retrospect” ideas here. Thanks for conceiving of and building this!
cosmtrek 10 hours ago|
Thanks for your thought!
thomask1995 37 minutes ago||
Very cool project!
almog 8 hours ago||
Other than being aesthetically pleasing (which it doubtlessly is), what's the use case for this?
anigbrowl 59 minutes ago||
As a once-off, not much because the treemap or graph look arbitrary so it's just eye candy. But a small fast treemap in your IDE would quickly become something you depend on, just like minimaps turned out to be really useful to enough people that they become a default in vscode.
cosmtrek 7 hours ago|||
My original motivation is to compare the task-solving ability of LLMs by visualizing the agent's trajectory. This offers an alternative way to inspect the capabilities of LLMs and agent systems.
embedding-shape 8 hours ago||
2019, in a comment about gource:

> It's pretty, but I can't think of anything I'd use it as a "tool" for. - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21560013

Seems any time this sort of software comes up on, people can't let the use case be "this is aesthetically pleasing".

Anyways, besides that, the README does clearly state "The Problem" and "The Idea" which outlines exactly why the author built this particular project.

almog 8 hours ago|||
> Anyways, besides that, the README does clearly state "The Problem" and "The Idea" which outlines exactly why the author built this particular project.

I asked about the use case _because_ the readme states a problem but does not offer a solution to that problem as far as I could see.

lukan 8 hours ago||
"The agent's understanding of the task becomes a shape you can see at a glance."

Use case is to monitor agents activity.

nurettin 8 hours ago|||
I agree with all of this, and gource is an excellent example, but this is still "what" and builds no case for a "why". Not even an anecdote like "I told the agent this and it completely misunderstood and did the other thing so I built this which you can use to undo the work after the fact."
bendauphinee 8 hours ago||
Because it’s fun and not everything has to exist for a reason other than that maybe? I built something in the same vein, and the way is because it’s neat. It serves no real purpose.
fxwin 9 hours ago||
Tried exploring a small project i built with CC, but i don't see anything in the tree/terrain view (The edits/reads/writes do show up in the timeline). The project itself doesn't exist on my drive anymore, is that a requirement?
thunfischtoast 9 hours ago||
Haven't tried it yet, but I think we need something in that direction. The terminal "Read file: xyz" mentions are not really followable. It would be nice to easily see where the LLM is taking info from.
Zie_Mordecai 3 hours ago||
Curious, have you thought of utilizing your tool within performance diagnostic testing?
pavi-t 1 hour ago||
very fun! sent me off into a rabbit hole building something similar tuned to my own projects
khalic 9 hours ago|
I know I sound childish, but I'm very excited to see our UIs catching up to sci-fi movies. Very cool work, I'll check it out today
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