Walkthroughs

A walkthrough is an ordered, multi-step explanation of code, pinned across files. Each step is a comment anchored to a specific line; together they tell a story that survives file rewrites.

Walkthroughs are how agents explain code — not just edit it.

Why this is its own primitive

Reading code you didn't write has gotten harder, not easier, as agents do more of the writing. Volume is up. The "author" isn't a teammate you can ping. Patterns shift between runs.

Grove treats understanding code as a first-class operation. An agent can be asked to take you through a piece of code; the result lives in Grove as a navigable artifact — not a wall of chat text — and survives the next refactor because each step anchors to content, not line numbers.

How they work

A walkthrough has a title, an author, and an ordered list of steps. Each step is a normal comment row with extra walkthrough_id and walkthrough_step fields set. That means:

Per-step reply and resolve flows work unchanged.
The Comments panel renders the walkthrough as a navigable card across the steps.
The whole thing is one append to the comment log — created atomically, no half-written walkthroughs.

Authoring

Agents create walkthroughs via the walkthrough_create MCP tool — one call, one walkthrough, N steps. Each step is {file, line, body}.

Ask an agent in chat:

"Walk me through how comment anchoring works. Start in src/lib/anchor.ts, then show me how the backend resolver uses it."

It returns a walkthrough; you read it as a card in the Comments panel and click through step-by-step.

Reading

In the Comments panel, walkthroughs render as a single card with a step counter. Click a step → Grove opens the file, jumps to the anchored line, and highlights it. Replies and resolution work per step.

Limits

No walkthrough_delete or walkthrough_resolve yet — agents can author but not retract a walkthrough. Known gap. You can delete individual step comments to prune.
Steps anchor to content via the same mechanism as comments, so a rewritten file may leave a step "stale" — the step still opens the file but the highlighted line may need to be found by hand.