Showboat
Fewer than 5 people recommend it so far, so there's no written verdict. Here is what commenters said.
Why people recommend it
“You might want to look at Simon Willison's showboat [0] tool, which generates walkthroughs of code to explain changes.”
Show 1 more
“Showboat seems like it could actually be quite useful for humans too”
Caveats and dissent
No one in these comments warned against it.
Often compared with
Who recommends it in their own words
From the makers not counted in the ranking
“I've experimented with a few projects around that now”
“I've released two pieces of software inspired by those ideas myself - Showboat”
“https://github.com/simonw/showboat - 292 stars”
“using my Showboat testing tool this morning”
“a new tool I built called Showboat. It's less than a week old but it's so far been working really well”
Threads where it came up
- I asked Claude Code to remove jQuery. It failed miserably 2 mentions
- Show HN: Showboat and Rodney, so agents can demo what they've built 2 mentions
- Show HN: Whiteboard (YC W26) – An open-source IDE for thoughtful software design 1 mention
- Understanding Is the New Bottleneck 1 mention
- AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making 1 mention
- MCP is dead. Long live the CLI 1 mention
Also written as showboat. Data: showboat.json. Quotes are verbatim; the verdict and theme labels are written by a model from these comments, and every clause links to its sources.
All comments 5
“You might want to look at Simon Willison's showboat [0] tool, which generates walkthroughs of code to explain changes.”
MCPs (especially remote MCPs) are like a black box API -- you don't have to install anything, provision any resources, etc. You just call it and get an answer. There's a place for that, but an MCP is ultimately a blunt instrument. CLI tools on the other hand are like precision instruments. Yes, you have to install them locally once, but after that, they have access to your local environment and can discover things on
“new showboat a lot for this”
“Showboat seems like it could actually be quite useful for humans too”
“I'll be sure to try these out.”