explainmyrepo

open source · free · no login

You built something genuinely good. Give it a front door that proves it.

Point explainmyrepo at any GitHub repo. It reads the real source and builds a cinematic, art-directed explainer — the page you proudly forward, a repo you own, and a downloadable AI knowledge pack — carrying a stranger from “never seen this” all the way to “oh, I get it. I want this.”

A real explainer page that explainmyrepo generated for the PhotonLayer repo: a bold headline 'The lens already did the thinking', a prism splitting white light into a rainbow, and an independent-explainer provenance line.
one flat repo in → bespoke explainers that build themselves · no two alike

PUBLIC repo? Build it right here — no keys, no install

See a real one

PRIVATE repo you own? Run it inside VS Code / Claude Code

Your editor already has everything this needs: the keys in your .env, the GitHub login that can see your private repo, and your Claude Code subscription to do the thinking. Add one OpenAI key and paste:

npx explainmyrepo <github-url>
  • a page you forward
  • a repo you own
  • an AI knowledge pack

Why this exists

Great tools ship with READMEs written by people who already get it — so a curious developer hits a wall of jargon and quietly closes the tab.

It isn’t that the tool is bad. The introduction is. Engineers ship things assuming people already know why they’d care — and they usually don’t. That costs you twice in the age of AI:

A human lands on your repo, doesn’t get it in thirty seconds, and leaves — the work was great, the welcome wasn’t.

An AI (Claude Code, Cursor) gets asked about your repo and guesses, because it has no grounded understanding of the actual source.

What you get

One command. Three things you keep.

Each one is grounded in your repo’s real source — no invented features, no confident guessing.

A live explainer page

The link you actually forward. A bespoke, art-directed walkthrough at its own URL — a real architecture diagram and a real data-flow diagram, drawn from your code itself.

the page you share

A GitHub repo you own

You’re invited as a collaborator on the explainer’s own repository, so you can edit it any time. It’s yours — separate from your app’s repo, never tangled with it.

yours to edit

A downloadable AI pack

A drop-in .zip: a real RVF vector knowledge base, a search CLI and an MCP server — so Claude Code or Cursor answer about your project from the real source, not a guess.

for their AI

And the builder itself does more when you clone it: npx explainmyrepo capabilities lists verified local companions — today, a shareable trailer and a social loop rendered from your page’s own assets for ~$0.

The process

Not a template filler. A thinking author.

This is the part you couldn’t be bothered to do by hand — and the part that makes the result look like a serious team built it. One brain runs your repo through an ordered sequence, and loops on the quality gate until it’s genuinely good.

The explainer build pipeline Seven stations run left to right: read, understand, conceive, author, visualize, then grade — which loops back to refine — and finally ship. A pulse of light travels along the connecting track. refine ⟲ until it clears the bar 01read 02understand 03conceive 04author 05visualize 06grade ⟲ 07ship
  1. Read — clone the repo and confirm it’s reachable.
  2. Understand — build a real RVF vector knowledge base from the actual code, plus a symbol index, dependency graph and entrypoints. Everything downstream is grounded here.
  3. Conceive — before writing a word, invent this repo’s art direction: a visual metaphor that fits, a palette, a type personality, a hero. That’s why every explainer looks different.
  4. Author — write along a comprehension arc, the questions a newcomer actually asks, in order. Every claim traces to a passage in the KB.
  5. Visualize — generate emotional imagery and crisp vector diagrams. A real architecture diagram and data-flow diagram are mandatory, drawn from the repo’s own structure.
  6. Grade ⟲ — render the page, score it on real pixels, and refine in a loop until it clears the bar.
  7. Ship — deploy the already-great page, create the repo, invite you in, and email you the scorecard, both screenshots and every link.

The quality gate

It refuses to ship something ugly.

A generic generator emits something and stops. explainmyrepo does not ship until an independent critic and a set of owner-signed questions both pass — on mobile and desktop.

The quality gate flow The live page is rendered at mobile and desktop sizes, an independent vision critic scores craft and substance, six operator questions must all answer yes, and only then does it ship. A back-arrow shows the refine loop. render · 390 + 1440px independent vision critic Gate A · substancedo they get it? Gate B · craftdid someone who cares make this? ≥ 90 6 operator questions ship it ✦ refine the named weakness

On both devices, the operator must answer YES to all six — looking at the real screenshots:

  1. Would this make me believe I understand this?
  2. Would this make it approachable?
  3. Would this explain it for somebody who doesn’t understand it?
  4. Would it give me confidence I understand the architecture?
  5. Does it make me smile — “oh, that’s cool”?
  6. Could someone who knows nothing about this domain read the first four sections and explain it back?
90mean · min axis 85

Anchored to real, hand-built exemplars — not impossible perfection. One weak axis (a raw diagram, a pretty-but-empty image) scores ~50 and fails the whole build. If a repo genuinely can’t clear the bar, it says so honestly instead of shipping slop.

Get seen

A great repo nobody can find is wasted.

Breaking through the noise on GitHub is almost impossible unless you’re already a name. So every explainer ships the professional touches that make your work look credible — and widen the circle of people (and AIs) who’ll actually find it.

SEO & AI discoverability, baked in

Real meta tags, sitemap.xml, robots.txt and an llms.txt — so search engines and AI crawlers find it and represent it correctly.

Favicons in 7 sizes

16 / 32 / 48 / 192 / 512, an .ico and an apple-touch icon — so the browser tab, the bookmark and the home-screen shortcut all look intentional.

A 1200×630 share card

A designed Open Graph card with your tagline baked in — so a link dropped in Slack, X or iMessage unfurls as a rich, elegant preview instead of a bare URL.

without it https://github.com/you/your-project
with explainmyrepo
The real share card generated for the agenticow explainer: a designed 1200 by 630 Open Graph image with the project's own art and tagline.

agenticow — git for agent memory

Branch a million-vector memory in 0.5 ms — a guided walkthrough + an AI knowledge pack.

agenticow-explainer.netlify.app

One brain, three doors

The judgment lives in one place.

The whole brain is a single Claude Code skill. Three thin doors run the identical engine — pick yours by one question: is the repo public, and whose keys should do the work?

This website — public repos

The zero-setup door. Public repo? Paste the URL above — no keys, no install, nothing to configure. We build it, host it, and email you the link.

explainmyrepo.isovision.ai

npx — private repos & your keys

Best run inside VS Code / Claude Code, in a project whose .env already holds an OpenAI key (art + grading) and a Netlify token (the live URL — optional). Logged into Claude Code? The brain runs on your subscription — no Anthropic key needed. Private repo: gh auth login first. The command checks all of this up front and tells you exactly what's missing.

npx explainmyrepo <github-url>

Claude Code plugin

Install once, then explain any repo with a slash command from inside Claude Code — same brain, your session does the thinking.

/explainmyrepo <github-url>

Real examples

Same engine. Six completely different looks.

Each was generated end to end and held to the same gate — unique by default, reliably great by construction. Open any of them.

The agenticow explainer page: a dark teal hero reading 'Branch a million-vector memory in 0.5 ms and 162 bytes' beside a glowing generative branching-network diagram.
agenticow ruvnet/agenticow

Git for agent memory — copy-on-write vector branching: fork, checkpoint or roll back a whole memory in milliseconds.

View explainer
The PhotonLayer explainer page: a deep-navy hero, 'The lens already did the thinking', beside a real prism refracting white light into a full rainbow spectrum.
PhotonLayer ruvnet/PhotonLayer

Optical AI — light computes the answer before any chip wakes up; a learned piece of glass does the math.

View explainer
The ruqu explainer page: a violet hero, 'A quantum computer on your normal laptop', beside a glowing quantum orb resting on a laptop.
ruqu ruvnet/ruqu

A quantum-computing simulator that runs in your browser — a faithful machine in pure Rust and WebAssembly.

View explainer
The ruvn explainer page: a completely different cream, editorial, serif theme reading 'Stop trusting the confident paragraph. Get a graded dossier', beside a hand-drawn case-file illustration.
ruvn ruvnet/ruvn

Turns a question into a graded, cited evidence dossier — every claim carries a receipt, every source a grade.

View explainer
The MetaHarness explainer page: a warm brown and amber hero set in bold condensed type, 'THE HARNESS IS THE PRODUCT.'
MetaHarness ruvnet/agent-harness-generator

Gives any project its own AI assistant that knows that project — a factory for bespoke agent harnesses.

View explainer
The Agentic QE explainer page: a teal-and-amber hero in bold condensed type, 'QUALITY IS THE PRODUCT.'
Agentic QE agentic-qe

Replaces manual testing with a fleet of specialist AI agents — quality engineering, automated end to end.

View explainer

The wall — fresh off the press

a dozen bespoke pages shipped for dozens of developers — each one positioning a repo the way a README never could. Different people, different repos, one quality gate. Yours takes about half an hour.

Yours belongs up here. Build it — if it passes the gate, it joins the wall.

Get started

One question decides your door: is the repo public?

Public repo → easiest right here: paste the URL, zero keys, we build it on ours. Private repo you own → run the npx command inside VS Code / Claude Code, where your keys and your GitHub access already live. Same engine, same quality gate, either way.

public repos · zero keys · easiest

Public repo? Paste it. We build it for you.

No keys, no install, no terminal. Drop a public GitHub URL and we run the full AI build on our keys, then hand you the live link.

This runs a full AI build — it can take up to ~15 minutes. Keep this page open to watch it happen, or just leave your email and we’ll send the link when it’s ready.

private repos · your keys · open source

Private repo you own? Run it in VS Code.

Recommended: run this inside a VS Code / Claude Code session, in a project whose .env already holds your keys — everything is picked up automatically. Private repo: gh auth login first.

npx explainmyrepo <github-url> --ship-best-effort
How many keys? Inside Claude Code: one.
  • OPENAI_API_KEY — imagery + the quality gate (required)
  • ANTHROPIC_API_KEY — not needed in Claude Code: the brain rides your Claude login. Bare terminal only.
  • NETLIFY_AUTH_TOKEN — the live URL (optional; --no-deploy builds the full page locally)

Set them in your project's .env — the CLI checks everything up front and tells you exactly what's missing and how to fix it.

It’s fully open source — pull it down, read it, run it, star it: github.com/stuinfla/Repo-Explainer

Give your repo the front door it deserves.

You did the hard part — you built something real. One command turns it into a page people actually read, an AI pack their assistants understand, and a first impression that finally matches the work.

npx explainmyrepo <github-url>
Get started Browse examples

Your turn

Did this land? Tell me straight.

Thirty seconds. Grade it, tell me what worked or what’s missing, drop an idea or a repo you’d point it at. It comes straight to me — real feedback shapes what this becomes.

How clearly did it land?
Still fuzzyCrystal clear