Walkthroughs
A walkthrough turns an answer into a guided tour - it moves you to the right screen and rings the control.
In simple words
An answer tells you what to do. A walkthrough stands you in front of it.
Ask “how do I make a crew?” and the answer arrives with a Show me how button:
Press it and the dashboard moves to the Crew screen, draws a ring around the control the step is about, says what it is for, and waits for you to press Next.
A walkthrough can only navigate. It never clicks a button, types in a field, saves, edits your config, or starts a run. That is the same ceiling every button under an answer has, and there is deliberately no third kind of action, because a third kind is how a chat button turns into an unreviewed effect. The pressing stays yours.
If you are not sure where a setting lives, ask rather than hunt. “Where do I set the default crew?” gets you a walkthrough that puts your cursor on the control instead of a paragraph describing where it is.
Two kinds of walkthrough exist and both open the same overlay with the same privilege. Neither can do more than the other, so there is no “trusted” variant that quietly gets to act on your behalf.
Where the button is
This is a dashboard feature; vibe ui opens it on 127.0.0.1:4317. vibe shell
has none and no command starts one, because a walkthrough’s whole job is moving a
browser to a screen.
Under a consult answer. Every answer carries Show me how, and it always builds a fresh walkthrough. It is built from the answer, not from what you typed: the question is not carried into the request, so what gets walked is the sequence the answer describes. Type a question the catalog covers and a second button, Walk me through: Make a crew, appears beside the composer - that is the authored one.
In the Supervisor panel. Only when the question asked to be shown - “how do I”, “show me how”, “walk me through”, “where do I”, “what is a”. Here Show me how dispatches the authored walkthrough when the question matches one. A question about state (“why did the last run block”) gets prose, not a tutorial.
Consult, “Work in Vibestrate”. The five authored walkthroughs, listed on the orb’s second card and under the Work in Vibestrate side of the Consult page’s segmented control. Open one to read its steps, then press Walk me through it, or Take me there on a single step to start at that one.
Press ? anywhere. The shortcuts overlay carries Take the tour for the dashboard tour, and a button row for the other four.
Written, or built on the spot
Authored - five walkthroughs for the five things most people do first. Every screen and every control they name is a literal the compiler checks and a test greps for, so they cannot drift into pointing at something the app no longer has.
Generated - everything else. A model writes the steps for the question you actually asked.
The five are Tour the dashboard, Make a crew, Make a flow, Run something for the first time, and Set a policy. A question matching one of those gets it, with no model call to wait for.
How a generated walkthrough is checked
Nothing a model wrote opens on trust. Each step names a page and, optionally, one control to ring, both checked against the app’s real route table and its real list of ringable controls. A failing step goes, and the rest still run.
What gets a step dropped:
A page that does not exist. The route is matched against the same gate a model-authored button passes through.
A control that does not exist. The ring target must be one of the app’s real ones. An invented name rings nothing, so the step goes.
A control on the wrong page. Ringing the Seats field on the Policies screen can only ever point at nothing.
A deep link. Steps go to pages and to blank editors, never to “the flow you mentioned”. A wrong deep link is worse than a right page.
Eight steps is the ceiling, enforced in code; the model is asked for at least two, which is a request rather than a guarantee.
When nothing opens, the panel says which of three things went wrong, because they are three different failures and one message for all of them would hide two:
“The answer came back as prose, so there is no sequence to walk.” No walkthrough object was in the reply at all.
“The walkthrough came back empty.” An object arrived carrying no steps.
“Every step named a screen or a control this app does not have.” Steps arrived and the checks dropped all of them.
An honest refusal beats a card pointing at nothing.
A worked example
Type this into the Supervisor panel:
How do I make a crew?That matches the authored Make a crew walkthrough, so pressing Show me how runs six steps in this order:
Naming the crew and pressing Save are still things you do.
When a step points at nothing
Screens change. If a step’s control is not on screen within a few seconds, the card says “Nothing on this screen matches this step yet.” and lets you carry on to the next step. It does not spin, and it does not disappear.
