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Public story · 2026-02-12 · source-backed
Two tools addressing the core verification problem: how do you confirm what a coding agent built? Showboat creates executable markdown documents mixing commentary, code, and captured output. Rodney provides browser automation for agents to screenshot and interact with web UIs they've built. Practical "agentic engineering" infrastructure.
Each link below shares sources, entities, or timing with this story.
— "The defining characteristic of a coding agent is that it can execute the code it writes." Never assume LLM-generated code works without verification. Patterns for python -c edge case testing, /tmp demo files, browser automation with Playwright/Rodney. Red/green TDD: when ag...
Willison published 8 posts on February 17 — his most prolific single day in recent memory. Key outputs: (1) Claude Sonnet 4.6 review, noting "similar performance to November's Opus 4.5" at Sonnet pricing, with SVG benchmark tests noting Sonnet 4.6 "consistently added decorativ...
Spotify's Portal team published Xirp on August 10: a vendor-neutral agentic development environment that manages concurrent sessions across Claude Code, Gemini CLI, and Codex, each session isolated in its own git worktree so dozens of agents can work the same codebase without...
Mario Zechner wrote an essay. Simon Willison amplified it. The core argument: agentic code generation creates "cognitive debt," where mistakes compound faster than humans can review them, and the speed that makes agents attractive is precisely what makes their failures catastr...
On June 22 Willison documented porting the 0.2B Moebius inpainting model to run fully client-side via WebGPU, using Claude Code to do the conversion, with a live demo. (simonwillison.net) A concrete data point on how far "small model plus coding agent plus WebGPU" has come for...
CCP announced the migration covering code that has run on Stackless 2.7 since 2010. The approach is to run futurize across the codebase and then manually review roughly 20,000 places where Python 2 and 3 behavior diverges, including integer division (Simon Willison). No comple...
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