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.

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.

  Run uvx showboat --help and
  uvx rodney --help and use those
  tools to demo the feature you built

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 check e35
  playwright-cli screenshot

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'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.

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!

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.

Google's antigravity does this automatically by creating Task & Walkthrough artifacts.

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?

  showboat image doc.md 'rodney screenshot'