Show HN: Mindwalk – Replay coding-agent sessions on a 3D map of your codebase

This is really cool! I’m becoming convinced the optimal UI to engage with agents, long term is going to be something spatial. No idea shape that even takes, though I really feel what you’ve made might be Xerox PARC days in terms of metaphor maturity, but there’s some real new seeds of “obvious in retrospect” ideas here. Thanks for conceiving of and building this!

cosmtrek10• 11 days ago

Thanks for your thought!

soupspaces• 11 days ago

Sort of like gource?

cosmtrek10• 11 days ago

Wow, it's my first time learning it. The visualization seems similar.

iamflimflam1• 11 days ago

gource seems to be on of those tools that people forget about. I don’t know if it’s the name or just simply that it’s the kind of thing you run once and think “that’s nice - what do I do with it?”. It’s not something you run regularly so it slowly disappears from memory.

khalic• 11 days ago

I know I sound childish, but I'm very excited to see our UIs catching up to sci-fi movies. Very cool work, I'll check it out today

daneel_w• 11 days ago

Completely unrelated, but the name and the visual similarities triggered a memory for me: https://amiga.abime.net/games/view/mind-walker#screenshots

totetsu• 11 days ago

This would have been a better aesthetic by far.

pshc• 11 days ago

Very glad to see this, I've been dreaming about spatial representations for code for a long time.

thunfischtoast• 11 days ago

Haven't tried it yet, but I think we need something in that direction. The terminal "Read file: xyz" mentions are not really followable. It would be nice to easily see where the LLM is taking info from.

bakwan44• 11 days ago

That's great but im not sure what the use cases are. Did you have something in mind when building this to help the conception process ? I dont feel like i need to know what the agent did, never opened the session json. But there could be gold in there perhaps.

freakynit2• 11 days ago

This can help you evaluate agentic capabilites of various llm's. How they explore codebase.

cosmtrek10• 11 days ago

My original motivation is to compare the task-solving ability of LLMs by visualizing the agent's trajectory. This offers an alternative way to inspect the capabilities of LLMs and agent systems.

altmanaltman2• 11 days ago

This reminds me of that community epsiode where they get the VR system and the dean has to walk through a maze, climb up several things so that they can go to a filing cabinet and then retrive a file. Yes, its cool to see and watch but it seems to be adding more friction than reducing it. Like who is going to spend that much time watching what their agents did when there are far quicker and efficient ways of scanning through changes and organizing code with better ergonomics?

lukan3• 11 days ago

"when there are far quicker and efficient ways of scanning through changes and organizing code with better ergonomics?"

Like what?

altmanaltman2• 11 days ago

Standard CLI version control tools like git diff, git log, or any built-in IDE diff viewer. Scrolling through a text summary of changes is inherently faster and more ergonomic than generating a 3D spatial visualization and watching an agent physically navigate through it.

alentodorov• 11 days ago

amazing!

fxwin• 11 days ago

Tried exploring a small project i built with CC, but i don't see anything in the tree/terrain view (The edits/reads/writes do show up in the timeline). The project itself doesn't exist on my drive anymore, is that a requirement?

Treegarden• 11 days ago

I tested it, history feature is per agent session, a cumulative history of all my agents would be nice.

nokeya• 11 days ago

First thought after reading “3D map of your codebase” was that now we will be able to code in Johnny Mnemonic style :D

freakynit2• 11 days ago

This is freakin cool.. worked in first go.

Thanks OP.

albert_e• 11 days ago

what visualization library is used -- looks cool -- maybe we could adapt it to other use cases that can benefit from a graph visualization

khurs• 11 days ago

This: https://www.npmjs.com/package/three?activeTab=readme

according to packages: https://github.com/cosmtrek/mindwalk/blob/master/web/package...

geeewhy• 11 days ago

this is cool! i started tracking file changes across sessions with file hunk method on a binlog.. to see hot paths, or do partial reverts where files werent committed across my sessions. not for visual, but operational for the harness i use. approach lets you see the whole rollups on a period of days or minutes. think there are many use cases where you can run a side agent to check things / progress analyze risky areas as you go etc etcs .. all file change lookups are 3-5ms. script here: https://github.com/geeewhy/haicue-brew/tree/main/scripts

i wonder if i would be able to visualize with mindwalk

almog2• 11 days ago

Other than being aesthetically pleasing (which it doubtlessly is), what's the use case for this?

embedding-shape• 11 days ago

2019, in a comment about gource:

It's pretty, but I can't think of anything I'd use it as a "tool" for. - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21560013

Seems any time this sort of software comes up on, people can't let the use case be "this is aesthetically pleasing".

Anyways, besides that, the README does clearly state "The Problem" and "The Idea" which outlines exactly why the author built this particular project.

almog2• 11 days ago

Anyways, besides that, the README does clearly state "The Problem" and "The Idea" which outlines exactly why the author built this particular project.

I asked about the use case _because_ the readme states a problem but does not offer a solution to that problem as far as I could see.

nurettin• 11 days ago

I agree with all of this, and gource is an excellent example, but this is still "what" and builds no case for a "why". Not even an anecdote like "I told the agent this and it completely misunderstood and did the other thing so I built this which you can use to undo the work after the fact."

cosmtrek10• 11 days ago

My original motivation is to compare the task-solving ability of LLMs by visualizing the agent's trajectory. This offers an alternative way to inspect the capabilities of LLMs and agent systems.

anigbrowl2• 10 days ago

As a once-off, not much because the treemap or graph look arbitrary so it's just eye candy. But a small fast treemap in your IDE would quickly become something you depend on, just like minimaps turned out to be really useful to enough people that they become a default in vscode.

alansaber2• 11 days ago

A lot of people want a use case. One I think might be cool is some kind of spatial/represented comparison: let's see how two different models interact with the codebase (for the same problem), what they touched, and what they did. Or the same model, but averaged across 100 runs, so we can see how much variance there really is per task. Something along those lines sounds interesting to me.

cosmtrek10• 11 days ago

Thanks bro, you see the value of this project!

sdesol2• 10 days ago

A lot of people want a use case.

I think the issue is, on the surface this is very much a "watch this non-deterministic actvity" but I can see the value in it. This is self promotional but I am working on a "Brain" (https://github.com/gitsense/pi-brains) for the Pi (https://github.com/earendil-works/pi) coding agent and I can actually see this being quite useful to quickly tell if you did make an agent smarter or not.

There is obviously different ways you can do this, but I can see being able to quickly visualize changes based on additional knowledge/constraints can be quite useful.

alansaber2• 10 days ago

I'd advise you to put a video demo at the top of your repo, similar to OP, to convince or interest me.

robbiejs• 11 days ago

Beautiful!

aviperl• 10 days ago

Heads up, I get a 404 on the 30 sec demo link.

mg794613• 10 days ago

"Claude, can you copy gource and put my name on it, no slop lol"

Octokat• 10 days ago

This seems like a different project to gource

tikimcfee3• 10 days ago

Hey OP, this is absolutely awesome and I am very much on your creative wavelength! I'd love to get in contact with you if you have a moment, as I've built an adjacent 3D visualizer that might complement the rendering portion of your system by providing actual glyph-level rendering of each file instead of block-based representations (glyph3d.dev). I have a similar "trace" feature that shows files pre/post edit from CC at the moment, so there is some definitely interesting overlap.

Well done creating A Cool Thing!

cosmtrek10• 10 days ago

Glyph3D looks cool! I'll look into it and give it a try as soon as I can.

tikimcfee3• 10 days ago

Cheers to ya! The rendering library is separate from the app itself, so I can help push that around if ya want a better handle to play with it.

4b11b4• 10 days ago

looks cool but a little rough. If you had another 3d scene how would you integrate this?

tikimcfee3• 10 days ago

Little rough is putting it generously haha, and thanks for checking it out anyway!

This is a standard three.js implementation with just some fancy shaders and loading primitives. If you looked at the IDE demo, that's basically the test bed I use for rendering. The library is available in NPM (I can update to latest this evening if you'd like to pull it that way) and it's meant to be composable, as are the app tools and field abstractions.

My hope is that it means import as a dep, call into the bootstrap, and then you can place a "glyph field" node wherever ya want and stream text and buffer updates to it.

esafak• 10 days ago

I think the chord diagram in the video is not informative. Generally speaking I suggest starting with the problem you are trying to shed light on, and devise the visualization accordingly. For example, if you are shipping a mobile app and want to keep your package small, the treemap in the video would help you understand how the space is allocated.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chord_diagram_(information_vis...

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treemapping

When it comes to coding sessions my problems are memory and inter-agent communication, for which I'm using https://ctx.rs/, and tracking, for which I'm testing https://usegitai.com/

I do not see what there is to be gained from replaying a session.

cosmtrek10• 10 days ago

Much appreciated. That said, I think we may have different use cases. My goal is to solve the problem of inspecting and evaluating how LLMs and agents perform tasks. This project could draw inspiration from Anthropic's research: https://www.anthropic.com/research/global-workspace. It's just the beginning, and there are lots of things to improve. :)

smw2• 10 days ago

Any license for it? I think technically we can't even run it legally at the moment?

cosmtrek10• 10 days ago

MIT. I've added it. Have fun!

smw2• 10 days ago

Many thanks!

Zie_Mordecai• 10 days ago

Curious, have you thought of utilizing your tool within performance diagnostic testing?

pavi-t• 10 days ago

very fun! sent me off into a rabbit hole building something similar tuned to my own projects

thomask1995• 10 days ago

Very cool project!

amit1525• 10 days ago

Interesting how can I explore more?

Show HN: Mindwalk – Replay coding-agent sessions on a 3D map of your codebase

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