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Showboat & Rodney: Simon Willison’s agent demo pattern for instant UI prototyping

Simon Willison introduced Showboat and Rodney as a workflow for agents to turn automated runs and browser steps into Markdown demos with output and screenshots.

Simon Willison introduced Showboat and Rodney as a demo pattern where an agent can generate Markdown docs with real command output and screenshots, powered by a 172-line Go CLI.

  • Showboat is a Go-based CLI for agents to assemble Markdown demonstrations; its core is 172 lines of Go.
  • The image command detects image paths in command output, localizes the files, and embeds them in the document.
  • A verify command re-executes demo documents to check output consistency.
  • Rodney is a Playwright-based CLI for browser automation.