I was so excited to see "Enough AI copilots! We need AI HUDs" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44705445)

Not specifically because of the AI perspective, but because of the broader recognition that we need better development tooling. I spend a lot of time thinking about how developers work, reason about and mentally model software. I was specifically excited because of the example "HUD" that Geoffrey chose to share: "A custom debugger UI which visualized the behavior of my program".

Yes, please, I agree. That type of code flow interface should exist everywhere. So *I built one*. Ruby is my pilot language, but more will come later.

Code Beacon is a VS Code extension that analyzes and displays tracing data from a Ruby tracer gem. At its core, it filters non-application traces and rolls up the raw trace to a much smaller call graph so you can easily see and navigate to what files/classes/methods got run and how they interact.

It's not finished at all, but it's a start and it should mostly work. If it doesn't and you want to let me know, I'll fix it. It doesn't work in containers, it's not in all marketplaces yet, it will fall over if your call trace exceeds 10MB, and it could be a lot more performant. The UI/UX needs refinement and I'm sure there are plenty of bugs and edge cases to address.

I would love to hear your thoughts!