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Scrimba Explain - Ask any question, get a video back instantly

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Scrimba Explain generates a narrated video tutorial about almost anything you ask, instantly. You can upload files, add links, paste code, or just write what you’re trying to understand. It's MUCH faster than any of the video generation models, as we utilise our DOM-based playback technology. The video explainer can include images, code walkthroughs, animations, diagrams, and other visual aids, plus voiceover, captions and cursor so it feels more like YouTube than traditional chatbot UX.

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Maker
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Hello! 😁

I'm Per, CEO and co-founder of Scrimba, a learning platform for 2+ million devs which I've been running for 10 years.

"Explain" is our attempt at creating the perfect AI tutor. The core idea is:

  1. As fast as a chatbot.

  2. As engaging as a video.

You type a question and within 2-3 seconds to get a video-like response, with animations, diagrams, images, code, and more. Narrated by a pleasant voice.

It's currently free for everyone during the beta phase 🤑 Our goal is to keep costs as low as humanly possible so that we can continue to offer a generous free plan for students.

Our users have already created over 20,000 explainers during the beta phase. It resonates really well with the type of people who prefer YouTube tutorials over technical articles.

You can also bring "Explain" to the tools you use day-to-day

  • ChatGPT Plugin

  • MCP support for coding agents like Codex, Claude, Cursor etc

  • Chrome Extension

  • GitHub: Video Explainers of your Pull Requests

The latter has been a godsend for us internally as we're drowning in PR's these days 😂 Getting a quick video makes it a lot easier for our team to review each others' code.

Looking forward to hear what you think! And please shout out if you have a feature request. I promise we'll ship it within a week!

Here's a few examples:

, is this Apache 2.0 liscenced

Maker

 The Scrimba platform itself is not open-source, but the underlying technology we've built Scrimba in is fully open. It's a programming language our CTO has created (Imba.io). As for the Explainer you've generated yourself: you are free to do whatever you want with those.

 Congratulations to the team on the new launch! I’m currently practicing full-stack development here, and the interactive teaching style has been incredible. Really excited to see what this new product brings to the table!

 Amazing new feature. This is the next level of learning with AI!

 the MCP support for Cursor and Claude is huge, qq does the agent stream structured JSON that Scrimba's frontend renders into the video canvas, or how does that integration pass context?

congrats for launch🙌

Maker

 Good question! It's not JSON, but our own home-made format which we turn into "video". But the agent streams this to us yes. Any relevant context the agent deems necessary will be embedded on that format.

 WoW... Congratulations Scrimba Team 👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻.
Explainer is an awesome tool that instantly generates content that one can watch short & digestible videos in an otherwise hard to understand archaic articles, repos or other form of contents.
This is definitely a must have tool for everyone to possess in order to extract maximum advantage out of it !!

Just tried Explain by asking "how the frontend sends data to the backend" and I was genuinely impressed by how quickly it turned the answer into a clear short video with diagrams and visuals!

What I really liked was that it asked me a question at the end to check whether I actually understood the explanation 🤩 as someone who creates programming education content, I really like that approach! It makes it feel much more like an AI tutor than simply another way of presenting an AI-generated answer.

Really interesting direction for learning technical concepts. Excited to see where you take this - well done, Scrimba team! Keep it up! 💪💪

Maker

 Thank you, Pete! Really appreciate your support 🙌 We're planning on expanding that end-of-video quiz btw. Like giving real coding challenges you can solve inline in the player. Or a text answer for more nuanced questions.

Oh my goodness, I am blown away.

I made it explain to me MedusaJS.

Wow!!! I had to let my wife try it, she loves it.

Maker

 haha that's a great reaction Vutomi :) Let us know if either of you find any areas missing or would like improved ✍️

Congrats on your launch.. this is great, good wishes for its success.. would it work with websites with non scrolling enabled to create a video from the website content..thanks..
Maker

 Thank you! Are you wondering if our Chrome Extension works on websites which use tabs to show content as opposed to scroll? It'll depend on which technique the website uses to hide content. For most cases, we'll likely not to pick up the content. But that's definitely something we can work to fix if it's a common issue people are experiencing. I've envisioned our Chrome Extension to be used on complex articles for the most part, though perhaps there are other use-cases I haven't thought about.

your understanding for my question is correct, thanks for explaining Per.. much appreciated

I have personally tried scrimba explain feature number of times til lnow and it is really amazing. It not only solve your confusion but also force you to think about other aspects as well. Great work by Per and Scrimba team by adding this feature to Scrimba. Really love it. Thanks for sharing with it learners community.

I've been giving this a spin! Lot's of fun, and the implementation is fast, intuitive and delightful. I've used it on my code base to understand it better, and a few things I've been curious about.

Maker

 Thanks, Emil! Glad to hear you're still in the camp of people who actually care about understanding their codebases 😜

Scrimba explain is one of my favourite scrimba features. It's really helped me grasp concepts I've been struggling with since forever. For example backend development terms like json, API architecture and so on

Maker

 Thank you! Our teachers are working hard to get more backend content shipped soon 👩‍🏫

I tried out the explain feature and was plesantly surprised.

The speed of generation and the coherance of the analogies and explanations hold up. I can also see the vision of how this could naturally integrate with pre-existing curated lessons.

I do think the explainations can be too short and high level, even when prompted for technical detail, but overall a solid product idea.

Maker

 Thanks for the feedback! Glad to hear you like it. A lot of people have requested longer explainers, so we've added the "Professor" teaching style (via the submit button dropdown) for this, as it goes more in-depth. You can also toggle "Playlist" on, so that you'll get a whole mini course on the subject.

Still hearing requests for even deeper content though, so we'll continue to push then envelope on this!

That is super cool! TIL you can ask it questions in general, not just about arcane JS things!

Maker

 Glad you find it useful Michael :) Yeah we see a lot of broader questions covering every imaginal topic (plumbing, sanitation... surprisingly lots of loo stuff haha) coming from our MCP integration with ChatGPT, though of course you can ask any question directly on Scrimba/explain too 🤓

I just tried it out. Great that it make a video on the subject. Quite a surprise !

Maker

 Hey Peter, we hope it was a happy surprise 😅 Did you use it via the free Chrome extension, Chatgpt plugin or directly on ? Let us know if you find any areas you'd like improved. ✍️

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