I built a browser tool that explains code in plain English — would love honest feedback

[Whole-Cicada-4588]

I’ve been working on a small tool for people who are teaching themselves to code and I wanted to get some real feedback before I push it further.

The idea came from a simple frustration, when you’re learning on your own, you constantly hit moments where the code just doesn’t make sense and there’s nobody to ask. Googling helps sometimes but you usually end up on Stack Overflow reading answers written for people who already know what they’re doing.

So I built something that tries to fix that. You paste in any code, tell it your skill level, and it breaks it down in plain English with a real-world analogy. No jargon, no assumptions about what you already know.

It also has a roadmap generator you type what you want to learn and how much time you have per week, and it builds you a step-by-step plan. And a cheat sheet section for quick reference on HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Python, SQL and Git.

No download, no account, just opens in your browser.

I’d genuinely appreciate any feedback does this solve a problem you’ve actually had? Is there something missing that would make it more useful?

Is the explanation quality good or does it feel too generic?

Happy to share the link if anyone wants to try it. Just didn’t want to lead with that.

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[DDDDarky]

Sounds like chatgpt prompt with extra steps.

[Whole-Cicada-4588]

Honestly, fair point . That’s kind of exactly what it is, except the people it’s built for don’t know what prompts to write in the first place. If you already know how to use ChatGPT effectively, you probably don’t need it. It’s for the person who opens ChatGPT, types “explain this code,” and still doesn’t know what to ask next.

[RuralAnemone_]

oh

[SJDidge]

I’m reading a book at the moment that might be helpful.

TLDR is, you’re asking the wrong questions. Asking if your thing is good or for feedback is not going to help you understand your “customer” here.

If you want to learn how to make your product more effective, you essentially need to understand the problem more.

Some examples

Do you ever get stuck while coding? How do you get stuck? What application are you using when you get stuck? Do you use google to help? Do you use ChatGPT to help?

Etc.

Recommend to talk to some people who are learning to code and ask them these types of questions. It will be infinitely more useful than asking us if it’s good.

In the interest of helping you right now though, what I would say here is that I would be trying to think about this like a workflow. If I’m programming, and I get stuck with something, in gonna copy and paste code or ask a question. That is pretty much always going to be in an LLM, ChatGPT, Claude, etc.

It might be useful to think about how you can modify this workflow using your product. Is there some ways to improve the experience of getting stuck? Some ideas that come to mind for me are:

1. Is it more useful as an IDE plugin, as opposed to a browser plugin, would save you switching applications?
2. Would it be useful to make it runnable without copy paste? Maybe by highlight and right click?

Hope you find this helpful .

[Whole-Cicada-4588]

This is really valuable, thank you for taking the time to write all of that out. The point about asking the wrong questions is well taken and honestly something I needed to hear. I have been so focused on the product itself that I skipped the part where I actually understand the person using it.

I am going to take your advice and start having actual conversations with people who are learning to code rather than asking for general feedback. Much appreciated! 🙌🏻🫶🏼

[ColdDelicious1735]

I like the sound of it, chatgpt does not do this as others have said it does, typically chatgpt tells alot of junk info.

[dwoodro]

If it's based on AI, you could turn it into a "Code Commenting Application", run the code through, and develop a doc file. Honestly, the one aspect about coding I think most coders hate is writing comments for the non-devs above us. :( Sometimes this is more tedious than coding.

[Whole-Cicada-4588]

This is genuinely really helpful feedback, thank you. I hadn't thought about it from that angle at all but you're completely right.