Creating Guided Demos

Overview

A guided demo is a narrative, not a command dump — and it serves two readers equally: a presenter driving it live for a room, and a lone user stepping through it to learn or reproduce the flow. Either way, at every step they know why they're here, what's about to happen, and what just happened.

Four beats: Frame → Tell → Show → Close. The script is the guide — it paces itself, explains each step, and streams the real tool output so what's watched is the actual thing working.

When to use

• Building a demos/*.sh to present a CLI/workflow live or to let a user self-walk it (onboarding, learning, reproducing a result).
• Turning a bare sequence of commands into a self-paced, narrated walkthrough.
• Not for: non-interactive CI scripts, one-off scratch scripts, or pure reference docs.

The four beats