This is very cool! I’ve wanted something like CodeMic for a long time.
Back when I was at Twitter, we used Review Board for code reviews (this was in 2009, before GH was a thing for most companies). It was tough to thoughtfully review large branches, especially for parts of the codebase that I wasn’t familiar with. I remember thinking, if I could somehow record the development process for a PR I was reviewing, it would be easier to understand what the submitter was trying to accomplish and how they went about doing so. I found myself more so reviewing code style instead of functionality, architecture, or design.
I watched most of the intro video, but didn’t go deeper on the site. Does CM integrate easily into the code review/PR process? I suppose I could just attach a link in any PR description?
Thanks a lot! I have thought about it being useful for learning, for fun, as a new kind of documentation, or even for onboarding new hires but the use case for code review didn't occur to me. That's great. I can think of 3 ways to share sessions:
- attach a link as you said
- once the web player is ready, it could perhaps be integrated into the code review tool. It'll be like embedding a youtube video
- the entire recorded session can be exported as a zip file and attached to the PR or shared privately
I'm personally not a fan of being talked at -- I don't listen to podcasts, and I reluctantly watch talks on YouTube at 2X speed -- but I would love to see a textual version of this. Basically a pane in VS Code where you could read a nicely-formatted version of Crafting Interpreters and click to make the code changes happen. Like Lion's Commentary on Unix but "live" in the editor.
Oh dear and I thought I was the only one. Falling asleep at the lame attempts of jokes and meaningless banter watering down the interesting points, the struggle to pay attention and keep the hopes high is real. And those YouTube videos, where every presenter seems to be at least halfway dyslexic, punching a line of code in 0.005 seconds then backbackbackspace-correcting every second word in 10 seconds, I'm just dying inside... Yes I'm being nasty but those bits are completely killing the experience. I think I'll have to resort to AI to watch, cleanse and transcribe or summarize those pieces of media for me.
Even with audio/video, it's still useful to have a side pane to show some text, slides, and visual aids all synced to the timeline. I was thinking something like the markdown preview in a split screen. Also, I'm sure some prefer to write than talk so once that feature is in place, we can have any mix of audio, video, or markdown guides.
The idea and arguments behind it impressive, but I'm stuggle to understand couple of things:
- why is Doom gameplay is shown alongside recording of someone coding a player logic? Was it the developer recording the screen and narrating, explaining what he means with that line of code?
- I see appeal to "relive" your own code (so you have a mental model of problem domain and the code base in your head). But how is it supposed to work for onboarding new developers? Even in the code examples in video, how does one understands the thinking - like, what are those magic constants (dist == 200), for example? Is there audio narration or what?
Also, I believe that next year will be the true explosion of agentic code editors, so how is it gonna work here? Is it going to capture prompts in Cursor/Windsurf? Will it even be easy to follow what changes AI assistant made in bulk in multiple files. Since I switched to Windsurf, the speed and workflow is so dramatically different from that old-school person typing coding workflow.
Yes the Doom gameplay was narrated. It was showing how the changes to the code affected the gameplay.
The main idea is to create narrated guides through the code. It can be audio only or mixed with video and images.
CodeMic basically records changes made to the code (as well as scroll, selections etc). It doesn't really care if the changes are made by the developer or the AI assistant. I think it would be the job of the narrator to explain why the files suddenly changed.
I'm excited to see what kind of content developers will create on CodeMic but personally, my inspiration is 3Blue1Brown. That is to say, not so much live recording of a 3 hour long programming session but instead shorter, more polished and well planned content. I suppose time will tell which will be more popular.
Thank you, that makes more sense now. Wasn't super clear from the intro video. I hope there will be enough people who need this kind of tool for their team/community!
Thank you. Yeah as much as I like to watch coding on Twitch/YouTube I always get lost 30 minutes in and can't tell what I'm looking at. I really hope CodeMic will change that.
Yep. And educational videos almost always skip over useful information, or don't explore something I'm interested in, or...
Self-directed learning is the best learning. Consider me sold, it's a pretty simple mashup in principle but it's immediately clear why it would work well (both implementation and as a user).
Looks like it checks the authored by submitter box, but maybe not the “other people can play with” part yet?
Not sure if early access with email gives everyone access now, or if it will be only given to some people or only when it’s a bit more ready.
OP should for sure make a follow up post, with Show HN prefix, when it’s available for all users. For now, if it’s not yet available for everyone to try, I think OP made the right choice to not mark this post as “Show HN”.
> In future versions, I plan to bring CodeMic to more IDEs: Emacs, (Neo)Vim, IntelliJ, Sublime Text, Helix, and others. It’d also be great to have a web player or mobile app for smaller screens (unlike screencasts, the font size can adapt to the screen).
I like the idea of CodeMic a lot. Will the mobile app or web player also allow you to explore the code like you would in the IDE? Perhaps something built on VS Code in the browser that integrates CodeMic? Similar to how GitHub has VS Code in the browser that you can use to explore and edit code from repos.
Thanks. Yes. That is one of the central ideas of CodeMic. The way I imagine the web player is that we'd be able to pause the session and browse the codebase and even download the entire codebase as it is at that exact moment.
With something like VSCode for browser, as opposed to a simple code viewer, we'd also be able to use the intellisense features to better understand the code.
Would love this for us to help us build interactive tutorials for Lowdefy, very cool. also think it is important that it exports well to youtube etc. and link back for when users want the interactivity.
Would be super if the player can be embed in docs.
This is an amazing idea ! I am going to find it useful.
One of the reasons I loved Scrimba for learning html/css/js was the fact that the lessons were integrated with an IDE and I could pause the teacher and tinker with the code right then and there.
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Back when I was at Twitter, we used Review Board for code reviews (this was in 2009, before GH was a thing for most companies). It was tough to thoughtfully review large branches, especially for parts of the codebase that I wasn’t familiar with. I remember thinking, if I could somehow record the development process for a PR I was reviewing, it would be easier to understand what the submitter was trying to accomplish and how they went about doing so. I found myself more so reviewing code style instead of functionality, architecture, or design.
I watched most of the intro video, but didn’t go deeper on the site. Does CM integrate easily into the code review/PR process? I suppose I could just attach a link in any PR description?
Great work!
- attach a link as you said
- once the web player is ready, it could perhaps be integrated into the code review tool. It'll be like embedding a youtube video
- the entire recorded session can be exported as a zip file and attached to the PR or shared privately
- why is Doom gameplay is shown alongside recording of someone coding a player logic? Was it the developer recording the screen and narrating, explaining what he means with that line of code?
- I see appeal to "relive" your own code (so you have a mental model of problem domain and the code base in your head). But how is it supposed to work for onboarding new developers? Even in the code examples in video, how does one understands the thinking - like, what are those magic constants (dist == 200), for example? Is there audio narration or what?
Also, I believe that next year will be the true explosion of agentic code editors, so how is it gonna work here? Is it going to capture prompts in Cursor/Windsurf? Will it even be easy to follow what changes AI assistant made in bulk in multiple files. Since I switched to Windsurf, the speed and workflow is so dramatically different from that old-school person typing coding workflow.
The main idea is to create narrated guides through the code. It can be audio only or mixed with video and images.
CodeMic basically records changes made to the code (as well as scroll, selections etc). It doesn't really care if the changes are made by the developer or the AI assistant. I think it would be the job of the narrator to explain why the files suddenly changed.
I'm excited to see what kind of content developers will create on CodeMic but personally, my inspiration is 3Blue1Brown. That is to say, not so much live recording of a 3 hour long programming session but instead shorter, more polished and well planned content. I suppose time will tell which will be more popular.
Self-directed learning is the best learning. Consider me sold, it's a pretty simple mashup in principle but it's immediately clear why it would work well (both implementation and as a user).
Not sure if early access with email gives everyone access now, or if it will be only given to some people or only when it’s a bit more ready.
OP should for sure make a follow up post, with Show HN prefix, when it’s available for all users. For now, if it’s not yet available for everyone to try, I think OP made the right choice to not mark this post as “Show HN”.
I like the idea of CodeMic a lot. Will the mobile app or web player also allow you to explore the code like you would in the IDE? Perhaps something built on VS Code in the browser that integrates CodeMic? Similar to how GitHub has VS Code in the browser that you can use to explore and edit code from repos.
With something like VSCode for browser, as opposed to a simple code viewer, we'd also be able to use the intellisense features to better understand the code.
Would be super if the player can be embed in docs.
https://lowdefy.com
One of the reasons I loved Scrimba for learning html/css/js was the fact that the lessons were integrated with an IDE and I could pause the teacher and tinker with the code right then and there.
CodeMic is going to be similarly useful for me.