/show-me: compact visual representations for coding agents

tl;dr make your agent converse visually instead of in walls of prose.

1npx skills add humanlayer/skills --skill show-me

Lighter and faster than HTML, good enough for most dev-work shaped problems.

Coding agents are pretty much unreadable

The former CEO of reddit:

https://x.com/yishan/status/2086534431075098628

Mario Zechner, creator of pi:

https://x.com/badlogicgames/status/2087068077309542889

Connor from Replicas:

https://x.com/connortbot/status/2081881377147109413

Dillon Mulroy even made a skill *popularlized a skill from @backnotprop to ask the model to simplify language.

https://x.com/dillon_mulroy/status/2079238358358778142

The contents are:

Restate your last message. Stop using jargon and speak coherently. State it more simply and concisely, like one human talking to another.

i am so sick of this

agents got more intelligent on paper, but the experience of using them got noticeably worse along this dimension

the thing people used to love about claude - its voice, it's personality, its "soul" has been flushed out in the RL dungeon

sol is somewhat less cringe but still regularly hits us with walls of jargon that make eyes glaze over

here's a response i got recently. this happens multiple times a day

my proposal: show me

We've been playing with internal tools to make this better, specifically for coding, and publishing them in a skill we call show-me.

It's live in humanlayer today, and if you want it in any other coding agent - you can get it here:

1npx skills add humanlayer/skills --skill show-me

Or, get the built-in humanlayer version that includes inline html and diagrams first-class:

1brew trust humanlayer/humanlayer
2brew tap humanlayer/humanlayer
3brew install humanlayer

If you ever watched coda hale's talk on intuition vs. attention in infrastructure systems, it's somewhat inspired:

• analyzing information is hard and exhausting
• your visual cortex was trained over millions of years to process rich visual information effortlessly
• optimize tools accordingly

Just as an axe must fit the human hand to be useful, software must fit the human mind to be useful

/show-me prompts the agent to use concise visuals to explain what's happening, instead of walls of prose.

This is really good for program design - the phase many folks skip these days, but that I think is essential. You should be discussing the shape of the code (the types, the signatures, the call stacks) before agents get to work on writing it.

The same techniques can also be used to explore large diffs post-hoc to understand what to dig into during review.

What's inside

component trees

Same idea on the frontend, with the state hooks and module boundaries that matter kept in and everything else left out.

I shared this one on twitter back in December 2025:

https://x.com/dexhorthy/status/1998968236617199803

call stacks

For orchestration or control-flow work, or just any backend-shaped problem, dillon gave us this "call stack" shape.

https://x.com/dillon_mulroy/status/2059985696148849025

Tanishq even wrote a tool to compute them straight from the AST

https://x.com/tanishqk/status/2085800689129935342

diagrams

A classic. If your chat interface supports inline mermaid, these can help a lot. (Sometimes they're still slop, but it's usually better than reading words)

Lots of options here. we like state diagrams and sequence diagrams the most.

file layouts

A shallow file tree, one line of responsibility per entry. Good for "where does this live" and for scoping a refactor.

pseudocode

Especially for algorithmic stuff, pseudocode can be more concise.

types and signatures

The shape of the code before any of it exists - the stuff that's too internal for an architecture doc but that an agent can still get wrong.

1interface Item {
2  id: ItemId
3  parentId: ItemId | null
4  // ...
5}
6
7interface Cursor {
8  position: ItemId
9  direction: 'up' | 'down'
10  // ...
11}
12
13resolveTarget(items: Item[], cursor: Cursor) -> ItemId | null

diff syntax

You can also use diff syntax for this, if most of the content is unchanged:

For a component change:

For a call-tree change:

For a file-layout change:

And for a state or control-flow change, where the shape is pseudocode rather than real code:

html mockups

HTML has replaced figma for a lot of our prototyping work. (tbh i never really was super handy with figma anyway)

html diagrams

Sometimes a diagram or explainer is what you need.

In humanlayer we let the agent include HTML directly in assistant responses.

But you can also just open it in your browser.

other inspiration

I also wanna hat tip @mattpocockuk for the html explainers that are generated by his /teach skill - very good.

go try it

1npx skills add humanlayer/skills --skill show-me

After installing the skill, invoke /show-me or ask the agent to use the show-me skill. Point it at a route, service, feature, pull request, or current topic, or just use it to ask the model to restate a question or statement.

this is too much content. show me.

or

/show-me as an html explainer

Let us know what you think! Tag @humanlayer_dev or @dexhorthy on with your results or what you customized/added and let's riff!

GIF