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Show HN: Showboat and Rodney, so agents can demo what they've built

simonwillison.net

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Re: Show HN: Showboat and Rodney, so agents can demo what they've built

#31

Post by markusw »

simonw wrote: post #24
markusw wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess it would still make sense to have "demo" and "browser-use" skills, so that the agent can reach for them proactively? I always try to remove as much friction as possible for myself, one little bit at a time.

My problem is that I work in dozens of different repos generally using Claude Code for web, which doesn't have a way to install extra global skills yet. I don't want to duplicate my skills into all those repos (and keep them updated) so I prefer the "uvx tool --help" pattern.

That's actually one of the things that has kept me from using Claude Code web (that, and I often need a Chrome browser for the agent). But they must be working on it.

I saw an MCP I've set up on claude.ai show up in my local Claude Code MCP list the other day, it seems inevitable that there will be skills integration across environments as well at some point.

Re: Show HN: Showboat and Rodney, so agents can demo what they've built

#32

Post by simonw »

johnfn wrote: post #29

Out of curiosity, what is the advantage of using Rodney when Playwright has the same set of features and AI understands how to write a Playwright script very well?

Maybe not a lot.

Showboat documents look neater if there are single one-line commands that do something useful. Dumping a full Playwright script into a cell is less readable.

Showboat also has a special feature where you can embed an image directly in the document by running:

  showboat image doc.md 'rodney screenshot'
The command you call should return a path to an image file as the last line of output. Rodney does exactly that.

It may well turn out that Rodney is unnecessary and people find better patterns using Showboat with existing tools like playwright-cli - in which case it won't matter because Showboat and Rodney aren't coupled to each other at all.

Showboat is definitely the more significant of the two projects.

Re: Show HN: Showboat and Rodney, so agents can demo what they've built

#33

Post by simonw »

markusw wrote: post #31
simonw wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My problem is that I work in dozens of different repos generally using Claude Code for web, which doesn't have a way to install extra global skills yet. I don't want to duplicate my skills into all those repos (and keep them updated) so I prefer the "uvx tool --help" pattern.

That's actually one of the things that has kept me from using Claude Code web (that, and I often need a Chrome browser for the agent). But they must be working on it. I saw an MCP I've set up on claude.ai show up in my local Claude Code MCP list the other day, it seems inevitable that there will be skills integration across environments as well at some point.

In working on Rodney I found out that the Claude Code for web environment has a Chrome browser installed already. It's a shame you can't see its output directly - even if it takes a screenshot there's no easy way to view it other than having it commit and push that to a branch in GitHub.

Re: Show HN: Showboat and Rodney, so agents can demo what they've built

#34

Post by water-drummer »

Wait, why should an LLM simply not just write directly to the markdown file instead of going through the extra step of using a cli tool which is basically `echo 'something' >> file.md` but with templates that should really be in a prompt instead of a being in a compiled binary? Did Claude come up with the idea for this as well?

Also, I am sure you must already know about Playwright mcp so why this? If your goal isn't to make the cli human-friendly, which is the only advantage clis have over mcps doing the same thing, then why not just use the mcp? It doesn't even handle multiple sessions and has a single global state file––this is slop.

Re: Show HN: Showboat and Rodney, so agents can demo what they've built

#35

Post by simonw »

water-drummer wrote: post #34

Wait, why should an LLM simply not just write directly to the markdown file instead of going through the extra step of using a cli tool which is basically `echo 'something' >> file.md` but with templates that should really be in a prompt instead of a being in a compiled binary? Did Claude come up with the idea for this as well? Also, I am sure you must already know about Playwright mcp so why this? If your goal isn't…

Because I don't want it to write to the markdown file directly. I want it to tell me the command it runs and I then run that command and write both the command and the output to the file.

Otherwise it's just writing a document, not building a demo you can review.

As far as I can tell you can't hook MCPs up to Claude Code for web.

I originally planned to support separate sessions but decided to leave that out for the initial release. I've opened an issue for that here: https://github.com/simonw/rodney/issues/6

Re: Show HN: Showboat and Rodney, so agents can demo what they've built

#37

Post by simonw »

mentalgear wrote: post #36

A bit like jupyter notebooks, isn't it?

Yes, very much so. It's a much thinner, less feature-rich alternative.

It would be interesting to experiment with Jupyter notebooks as an alternative that could work in Claude Code for web.

I had a poke around just now and couldn't find an existing CLI tool that lets you build those up a section at a time in the same way as Showboat. I did find this Python library though:

    uv run --with nbformat python -c '
    import nbformat
    nb = nbformat.v4.new_notebook()
    nb.cells.append(nbformat.v4.new_markdown_cell("# NBTerm Exploration"))
    nb.cells.append(nbformat.v4.new_code_cell("import sys\nprint(f\"Python {sys.version}\")"))
    nb.cells.append(nbformat.v4.new_code_cell("x = [i**2 for i in range(10)]\nprint(x)"))
    nb.cells.append(nbformat.v4.new_code_cell("sum(x)"))
    with open("demo.ipynb", "w") as f:
        nbformat.write(nb, f)
    '
So you could tell the agent to run code like that and then inspect the `demo.ipynb` notebook later on. It doesn't show the result of evaluating the cells though, you need to run this afterwards to have that happen:

    uv run --with nbformat --with nbclient --with ipykernel python -c '
    import nbformat
    from nbclient import NotebookClient

    nb = nbformat.read("demo.ipynb", as_version=4)
    client = NotebookClient(nb, timeout=60)
    client.execute()
    nbformat.write(nb, "demo_executed.ipynb")
    '

Re: Show HN: Showboat and Rodney, so agents can demo what they've built

#38

Post by mentalgear »

simonw wrote: post #37
mentalgear wrote: post #36

A bit like jupyter notebooks, isn't it?

Yes, very much so. It's a much thinner, less feature-rich alternative. It would be interesting to experiment with Jupyter notebooks as an alternative that could work in Claude Code for web. I had a poke around just now and couldn't find an existing CLI tool that lets you build those up a section at a time in the same way as Showboat. I did find this Python library though: uv run --with nbformat python -c ' import nbf…

Cool, I have to say I find the idea intriguing as a tracability tool in they that LLMs can show you step be step how a program is assembled / an output was generated.
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