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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

#11

Post by eliben »

simonw wrote: post #4
eliben wrote: post #2

Very interesting! I encountered the problems these tools are trying to tackle just recently while trying to guide an agent into creating an in-browser tool for me. Closing the loop on a web interface isn't as simple as CLI-only tools. I should give this a try. It's also interesting that you've shifted to Go for your agent-coded CLI tools, Simon.

I'm dabbling with Go at the moment for small tools, mainly as an excuse to learn a new language but also because having a single standalone binary is convenient for shuttling these tiny little tools around. ... but then I'm mostly running them with "uvx name-of-tool" because it turns out Python's packaging infrastructure for binary tools is so good!

Right, standalone binaries for CLI tools is great. And if one has Go installed, they can just `go run ...` any tool from its GitHub path, all installation/build/caching happens automagically (meaning the execution is immediate after the first run).

But I can definitely see how someone with `uv` muscle memory wants everything in the same command.

`uv` is the best thing that happened to the Python ecosystem since... I don't know... maybe Numpy.

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

#12

Post by markusw »

tardismechanic wrote: post #6

See also (the confusingly named) playwright-cli https://github.com/microsoft/playwright-cli Different from the cli used for running tests etc that comes bundled with PlayWright Sample use: playwright-cli open https://demo.playwright.dev/todomvc/ --headed playwright-cli type "Buy groceries" playwright-cli press Enter playwright-cli type "Water flowers" playwright-cli press Enter playwright-cli check e21 playwright-cli…

Oh, I hadn't seen that one either, thanks for sharing. Here I am still using the Chrome Devtools MCP like a caveman. :D

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

#14

Post by markusw »

simonw wrote: post #5
saberience wrote: post #3

Sounds like both of these tools could be one shot by either Claude or Codex. Or alternatively, just be a skill versus a tool. My “agents” already demo stuff all the time by just being prompted to do so. I have notations in my standard Agents.md for how I want my documentation, testing etc.

They kind of were one-shotted by Claude. The value is in coming up with a consistent design and good enough --help that you can prompt: Run uvx showboat --help and uvx rodney --help and use those tools to demo the feature you built The help text effectively doubles as a skill.

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.

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

#15

Post by giancarlostoro »

I'll be sure to try these out. I've been building my own alternative to Beads with a concept called "gates" which do not let you close tasks as complete until a gate passes. Would love to throw these in as "gates" for my current workflow.

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

#16

Post by giancarlostoro »

toastal wrote: post #9

If agents can generate text so easily, why would they be limited to Markdown instead of reStructuredText, AsciiDoc, or LaTeX which have rich features that help users understand text? I can understand developers refusing to adopt proper formats for documentation, but this seems odd for the bots. It doesn’t even generate the correct syntax block in Markdown using “bash” instead of “sh-session”.

I think its primarily because that is the most common formatting in every editor now? I could be wrong. Markdown has become the standard for README files for over a decade now.

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

#18

Post by Hansenq »

I was a bit confused as to how everything works until I read it in detail. Really cool tools, but I think one thing that would help in the introduction is: saying explicitly that the generated .md document is for you (the user) to read through, observe the output of the CLI call, and ensure that the output matches what you would expect.

It's basically an automated test, but at a higher abstraction level and with manual verification--using CLI tools rather than a test harness. Really great work!

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

#19

Post by nzoschke »

go-rod has been instrumental to my agentic coding loops too. Some uses:

- E2E testing of browser components

- Taking screenshots before and after and having Claude look at them to double check things

- Driving it with an API and CLI as a headless browser

Will definitely give Rodney a look.

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

#20

Post by usefulposter »

brian200 wrote: post #13

[flagged]

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.

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