Posted by simonw 5 hours ago
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. It seems like it would be fairly trivial to generate an index of markdown blocks so that they could be edited individually.
I like the idea of Rodney, but I wonder if you might actually have better results by asking the agent to generate equivalent Selenium scripts instead. I'm specifically suggesting Selenium because it's been around so long so I assume there's a lot of Selenium in the LLMs training data, but there are other options that might work too.
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.
Passing tests in your repo are great documentation of the tool at a microscopic level. And rerunning tests only burns tokens on failures (since passed tests just print a dot) so it’s token efficient too.
Some other neat tricks:
- For greater efficiency configure your test runner to print nothing (not even a dot/filename) for test successes. Agents don’t need progress dots, only the exit code & failure details
- Have your agent implement a 10ms timeout per test. pytest has hooks to do this. The agent will see tests time out and mock out all I/O and third party code - why test what one assumes third parties tested already! Your test suite is CPU-bound without a shared database, has no shared data and no tests that interfere with or depend on each other, so tests can run in parallel.
I'm OK with longer running tests because I always have them run against a real database (often SQLite, sometimes PostgreSQL) and real files created in temporary directories but I can see how the time limit might be useful for tests that don't need those kind of components.
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!
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'
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.
It's also interesting that you've shifted to Go for your agent-coded CLI tools, Simon.
... 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!
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.
Main difference is Rodney can be installed as a single Go binary or via uv/pip, agent-browser is Rust and npm.
Looks like agent-browser was first released at the start of January, it's very new.
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)
'
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")
'