Compact Visuals Over Verbose Text: The Case for the show-me Skill

X postFrancescoOpinion

Francesco praises the $show-me skill for replacing wordy LLM responses with concise code diffs and diagrams.

Key points

  1. Francesco describes $show-me as his favourite skill, invoking it dozens of times each day.
  2. The tool condenses agent information into small diffs and visual diagrams rather than verbose prose.
  3. Matt Pocock integrated the functionality into his $pr skill for pull request workflows.

Why it matters

AI coding assistants frequently produce lengthy text justifications. Replacing boilerplate explanations with focused diffs and diagrams speeds up comprehension during development.

Analysis

This post highlights an ongoing shift towards higher information density in AI-assisted developer workflows. Skills designed to enforce diffs and visual outputs help reduce cognitive overhead.

Original post

Francesco

@frankdilo · 6 October 2026

$​show-me has to be my absolute favorite skill. It compresses information into small diffs and diagrams to show you instead of using a thousand words like LLMs usually do. I invoke it tens of times per day. @mattpocockuk even integrated it into its $​pr skill so now PRs

161 likes3 replies313 bookmarks11.6k views

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More posts in the thread (1)
  1. @giuseppegurgone @mattpocockuk Pretty cool!
Selected replies (3)
  • @giuseppegurgone @frankdilo @mattpocockuk I built a similar thing that can talk back to the agent though t.co/refW68xEHR
  • @buswe_com @frankdilo @mattpocockuk Dropping it in the repo under .claude/skills is the other win: everyone's PRs come out in the same shape with no style guide to enforce.
  • @sharathM1812 @frankdilo @mattpocockuk feels like half of agent output is just justifying itself in words. a diagram or diff says more in less space

Mentioned links

Summary generated by AI (Gemini 3.8 Flash, 7 October 2026). It may contain errors – the original source is authoritative.

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