Show HN: A tool that explains Python errors like you're five

4 hours ago 2

Error Narrator is a Python library that uses AI to provide clear, human-readable explanations for Python exceptions and tracebacks. Instead of just getting a stack trace, you get a structured, educational breakdown of what went wrong, right in your console.

The library is multilingual, currently supporting English (default) and Russian.

🤖 AI-Powered Explanations: Uses language models from Gradio or OpenAI to explain errors.
📝 Structured Output: Provides a clear, markdown-formatted explanation with:
- 🎯 Root Cause: What caused the error.
- 📍 Error Location: Pinpoints the exact file and line.
- 🛠️ Suggested Fix: Offers a code diff for a potential solution.
- 🎓 A Learning Moment: Explains the underlying concepts to prevent future mistakes.
🎨 Rich Console Output: Uses the rich library to print beautiful, colorized output in the terminal.
⚡ Async Support: Provides asynchronous methods (*_async) for non-blocking operations.
💾 Caching: Caches explanations for identical tracebacks to speed up repeated runs and reduce API calls.
🌐 Multilingual: Supports explanations in English (en) and Russian (ru).

pip install error-narrator

1. 🔑 API Key Configuration

The library supports two providers: gradio (default) and openai.

Gradio (Default & Free): This provider uses public, community-hosted models on Hugging Face Spaces. An API key (Hugging Face User Access Token) is optional for most public models but may be required for private models or to increase rate limits. You can get a token from your Hugging Face account settings.
OpenAI (Higher Quality & Paid): This provider uses official OpenAI models. An API key from your OpenAI dashboard is mandatory.

💡 Tip: The library will automatically detect API keys set as environment variables:

HUGGINGFACE_API_KEY for Gradio (optional).
OPENAI_API_KEY for OpenAI (required).

How to Set Environment Variables

You can set these variables for your current terminal session or add them to your shell's profile file (e.g., .bashrc, .zshrc, or your system's environment variable settings) for them to be permanent.

On macOS/Linux:

export HUGGINGFACE_API_KEY="your-key-here"

On Windows (Command Prompt):

set HUGGINGFACE_API_KEY="your-key-here"

On Windows (PowerShell):

$env:HUGGINGFACE_API_KEY="your-key-here"

Here is a simple example of how to use ErrorNarrator. The library will automatically catch exceptions within a try...except block and explain them.

By default, the explanation will be in English.

import traceback from error_narrator import ErrorNarrator # The narrator will automatically look for the HUGGINGFACE_API_KEY environment variable # if no api_key is provided. narrator = ErrorNarrator() try: # Some code that might raise an error result = 1 / 0 except Exception: # Get the traceback as a string traceback_str = traceback.format_exc() # Get the explanation and print it to the console narrator.explain_and_print(traceback_str)

3. 🌍 Getting Explanations in Russian

To get explanations in a different language, use the language parameter during initialization.

# ... # Initialize with Russian language support narrator = ErrorNarrator(language="ru") # ...

4. 🏷️ Using a specific provider (e.g., OpenAI)

You can also specify a provider and pass the API key directly.

narrator = ErrorNarrator( provider="openai", api_key="your-openai-api-key" ) # ...

5. 🔄 Gradio Provider: Model List and Rotation

By default, the gradio provider uses a predefined list of public models and tries them in a random order for each request. This rotation and retry system increases the chances of getting a successful response.

How to Provide Your Own Model List (Recommended)

The best way to customize the model list is to pass your own list directly during initialization using the models parameter. This gives you full control without editing any package files.

# Provide a custom list of models for rotation my_favorite_models = [ "hysts/mistral-7b", "Tblue/gemma-7b-it", "your-username/your-own-model" ] narrator = ErrorNarrator( provider="gradio", models=my_favorite_models )

How to Use a Single Specific Model

If you want to disable rotation and use only one model, you can use the model_id parameter as a convenient shortcut.

# This will ONLY use the specified model narrator = ErrorNarrator(provider="gradio", model_id="hysts/mistral-7b")

How to Edit the Default Model List

If you want to change the default behavior for all your projects, you can edit the gradio_models.py file directly in your Python site-packages directory. This is generally not recommended unless you know what you are doing.

Contributions are welcome! Please feel free to submit a pull request or open an issue.

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