explain-dev
Explain Dev
Turn technical complexity into an artifact the developer can inspect, manipulate, and understand. As agents do more implementation work, help the human oversee behavior, assumptions, tradeoffs, and evidence. A bespoke, disposable explainer can be worth building for a single decision.
Start with the understanding task
Infer the audience, topic, and decision from the request and available code. Ask only when a missing detail changes the explanation materially. Respect an explicit output format. Otherwise choose the format that best exposes the mechanism; the ladder below describes capabilities, not a requirement to generate everything.
| Mode | Use when | Read |
|---|---|---|
| Writing | Precise steps, a quick explanation, or an asynchronous review | writing |
| Diagram or image | Structure, dependencies, boundaries, or message order matters | diagrams |
| Interactive HTML | The reader needs to explore state, parameters, alternatives, or execution | HTML |
| Explainer video | Time, movement, or a narrated conceptual derivation teaches the mechanism | video |
Read only the selected references. Combine formats when useful: a short summary beside a diagram, or a transcript beside a video. Richer output is available, not automatically better.