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

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

#61

Post by skeledrew » Wed, Feb 11, 2026, 2:03 PM UTC

I'm super into AI, but only just started ramping up my coding-with-LLMs repertoire this month. And a pain that I'm experiencing again is that the quality isn't there (because I'm primarily using+evaluating free models). Showboat just might be a key tool in bridging the gap.

> I’m still a little startled at how much of my coding work I get done on my phone now

I recently noticed that quite a few of my personal projects are related to making development mobile friendly, and have consciously started prioritizing them. It feels really wasteful to have all this power in my pocket and not being able to fully utilize it in the creation of things. And I think this is where we're ultimately headed: a point after which most - if not all - work will be done on mobile.

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

#62

Post by anonymous908213 » Sat, Feb 14, 2026, 1:53 AM UTC

yodon wrote: post #25

usefulposter wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This comment is regurgitating Simon's post with too much adherence to the input tokens. The unnatural, promotional restating of proper nouns in constrained output is a notable LLM tell. Please respect the Hacker News community and read https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46747998 .

If you could actually detect AI content with high accuracy, you would sell it as a service and print money, but you can't, so you force all the rest of us to wade through posts like yours, claiming to tell the rest of us what is and isn't AI, which are FAR more annoying, disruptive, and low signal than the post you're commenting on, which is intelligent, adds to the conversation, and is, by my read, almost certainly…

> If you could actually detect AI content with high accuracy, you would sell it as a service and print money,

What an inane comment. Much like LLMs are completely incapable of replacing me in software development, they are likewise completely incapable of replacing a human's ability to detect LLM-generated output. It is absolutely possible for a human to build sufficient heuristics to detect it, and it is not possible to automate this process in such a way that it can be sold as a service. The idea that everything can be automated and that human skills are irrelevant is a complete farce which is easily disproven by the fact that even the frontier "AI" labs are still relying on human labour and producing eg. Electron to provide a chat GUI in a desktop application.

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

#63

Post by ichverstehe » Sun, Feb 15, 2026, 8:29 PM UTC

simonw wrote: post #59

markusw wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you had a post about marimo notebooks at some point? I think they would be better suited for that. Their representation is just Python, they can run as scripts, and they have native HTML output. But of course, it only works for Python.

That's a great idea.

I am working on a lightweight notebook alternative which is literally just a Python script that can be viewed interactively. Maybe that could be useful? https://harry.vangberg.name/posts/pdit-the-python-un-noteboo...

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

#64

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Feb 19, 2026, 12:15 AM UTC

simonw wrote: post #46

samuelson wrote: post #44

I love your content, but I wish you'd make your blog theme responsive for wider screens/non-mobile. I prefer to read content like this on a large screen. Showboat seems like it could actually be quite useful for humans too, just for making quick notes from a CLI without opening an editor. The "pop" command makes me wonder if there would be a benefit to also having an array-like in addition to the stack-like interface…

First time someone's asked for the site to be wider! I have it setup so on a wide screen the text is still a readable width, do you think it needs to bump up that max width a bit more? I've found the models are so good at Playwright that I don't consider Selenium any more. Rodney is my first experiment not using Playwright.

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