November 6, 2025
Tour de Code or Detour?
Show HN: Dynamic code and feedback walkthroughs with your coding Agent in VSCode
Dev drops Intraview: AI-guided code tours spark cheers, eye-rolls, and telemetry angst
TLDR: A new VS Code add-on, Intraview, uses your AI helper to auto-make code tours and review walkthroughs. HN loves the idea but split over telemetry, cloud privacy, and whether it’s a helpful map or just CodeTour with extra hype—privacy toggles and open-source options were heavily requested.
A solo builder just posted Intraview to Hacker News: a VS Code add‑on that teams up with your existing AI helper (like Claude) to create visual code tours and feedback walkthroughs. Think “guided museum tour,” but for messy repos. The demo is raw, the repo is huge, and the comments are even bigger. Fans are ecstatic: finally, a way to understand sprawling codebases without spelunking for hours. Skeptics clap back: “Isn’t this just CodeTour… with marketing?” Cue the AI hype vs. real dev work debate. Privacy alarms sounded fast. While the creator says only anonymous usage data goes to Microsoft’s Azure logs, a chorus yelled “telemetry off by default or bust.” Others worried their company code could still leave the laptop if their AI runs in the cloud, even if the tool uses a local bridge (MCP, a way apps talk to your AI agent). The vibe? Split down the middle. There’s playful snark (“HN hates videos, give me text!”), name puns (“Intra-view or inter-view?”), and a lively tussle over whether this actually helps people learn systems or just papers over poor docs. Wish list from the crowd: offline mode, open-source core, tours saved in the repo, and a Vim plugin—because of course. The hot take factory is open, and it’s loud on HN.
Key Points
- •Intraview is a VS Code extension that creates visual code tours and guided feedback sessions.
- •It integrates with existing coding agents (e.g., Claude, “GPT5-codex”) via a local Model Context Protocol (MCP).
- •The tool is described as secure-by-design, with only anonymous usage telemetry sent to Azure logging.
- •A demo shows installing Intraview and using it on the Plotly.js GitHub repository to learn visualization building.
- •Intraview supports VS Code and forks like Cursor, and the author invites feedback on Hacker News and updates via LinkedIn.