horizontwo/Lenzon — Lenzon: Animated Code Explainers
Transcript
QuickFacts
Welcome to Lenzon — a system that transforms code into narrated visual stories. Let's explore how it works.
PlainEnglish
At its core, Lenzon takes a GitHub repository, analyzes the code to understand what it does, and turns that understanding into a sequence of animated scenes with synchronized narration. You paste in a repo URL and get back a shareable video walkthrough.
Architecture
Lenzon is a dual-layer system. The player engine runs entirely in your browser — it's a React component that renders animated presentations from structured scripts. The pipeline surfaces talk to a backend service that analyzes repos and generates those scripts. The player is backend-agnostic, so you can run it standalone if you already have a script.
QuickFacts
The stack leans on React and TypeScript for UI and type contracts. Three.js powers the 3D diagram layer, anime.js handles transitions, and Prism provides syntax highlighting. Google Cloud Text-to-Speech pre-generates narration, so playback is smooth without relying on live TTS.
Architecture
The repo is organized as a monorepo. Shared-types holds all the TypeScript contracts — analysis, scripts, settings — that cross the player-server boundary. The player app has three main layers: core rendering primitives, the script orchestration engine, and a template registry with over twenty built-in scene types. There's also a VS Code extension for PR explainers and reference server surfaces.
Architecture
Here's how a full generation run works. You enter a repo URL, and the UI sends it to the backend for triage — a quick scan that identifies subsystems and entry points. You pick an analysis mode and which parts to focus on, then the backend runs a deeper analysis to produce structured JSON. You tweak settings like persona and pace, generate the script, and the player takes over to render the presentation.
PlainEnglish
Think of templates like PowerPoint layouts. You don't design the slide from scratch every time — you pick a layout that fits your data and fill in the blanks. Lenzon works the same way: there are over twenty templates like code-zoom, flow-diagram, and tech-stack-breakdown. The producer agent picks which template to use for each point and passes in the content.
Architecture
ScriptPlayer is the orchestrator. It's like a projector operator with a stopwatch. It loads each scene, renders the template, starts the narration audio, and waits for the audio to finish or the minimum hold time, whichever is longer. It fires beats — timed events like highlighting a line or pulsing a node — mid-scene to keep the visuals synchronized with the narration.
Architecture
The VS Code extension brings explainers into the editor. You run a command, it detects which repo and branch you're on, prompts sign-in if needed, and calls the backend to resolve the branch to a pull request. If an explainer exists for that PR, it opens a panel beside your code and auto-plays the walkthrough. You can pause, scrub, and review the code side by side.
Community
This repo is fresh and actively maintained. The last commit landed today, and there's one contributor — Rick Gonzalez — driving the project forward. With two branches and no tags yet, Lenzon is in active development, likely iterating quickly before its first formal release.
PlainEnglish
And that's Lenzon. It's a toolkit for turning code into stories — analyzing repos, generating structured scripts, and rendering them as animated, narrated presentations. Whether you're onboarding a teammate, reviewing a pull request, or sharing your project with the world, Lenzon makes code approachable and engaging.
How this was made
Lenzon read horizontwo/Lenzon and generated this walkthrough automatically. The narration above is the transcript of what it says.
Explain a pull request from your own repo
Point Lenzon at a repo or a pull request and get a narrated walkthrough like this one.
Try it