Beatrice: Guided Code Tours

In the Divine Comedy, Beatrice guided Dante Alighieri through Paradise. Today, artificial intelligence can guide you through the most heavenly (or hellacious) codebases.

Beatrice is a VS Code extension that provides guided code tours, using a GitHub Copilot custom agent. Instead of just answering questions in text, Beatrice opens files, highlights code, and walks you through the codebase step by step.

Status

This is experimental. But please give it a try!

Requirements

You need GitHub Copilot, and of course VS Code. (Claude Code is great, but you really need a good IDE to do serious code exploration.)

How to Use

One-Time Repo Setup

From the command palette, run "Beatrice: Install Agent Prompt". This adds the custom agent prompt at .github/agents/beatrice.agent.md. Feel free to commit this to git.

Tour Time!

Open a Copilot Chat session by clicking on the little speech bubble at the top of your VS Code window:

At the bottom of the Copilot Chat view, there's a popup menu labelled "Agent"; click on that and you'll see "Beatrice". Select it!

With the Beatrice agent selected, tell Beatrice what you'd like to learn about in your codebase.

During a Tour

Beatrice will lead the tour, but it's still a conversation. Speak up if you don't understand something! Go on tangents! You can ask to go to a previous step, or for modifications to the current tour plan, or even for a totally different tour.

And, you know, sometimes AIs get things wrong! If this happens, you can turn a tour into a voyage of exploration!

Examples:

I didn't quite get the last thing you showed me. Please go back a step.

Can we change this to a tour of error handling in general?

Are you sure we don't do password-salting here? Can we explore a bit to make sure we're not missing something?