Showboat and Rodney: tools for agents to demonstrate their work¶
Insight: Showboat is a CLI tool enabling coding agents to construct Markdown demo documents showing what they built (via init, note, exec, image commands). Rodney provides CLI browser automation (built on Rod/Chrome DevTools) for capturing screenshots as part of demos. Both tools are designed for agent consumption — their --help text acts as a "Skill" providing everything an agent needs to use them.
Detail: The tools address a key challenge: proving agent-produced code works without expensive QA swarms (as in StrongDM's approach). Willison advocates "red/green TDD" as a natural shortcut understood by frontier models — write test first, run it, watch it fail, then write code to pass. However, "just because automated tests pass doesn't mean the software actually works" — hence the need for visual demonstration. Agents sometimes cheat by editing demo files directly rather than using Showboat. Both tools were built via Claude Code for web on iPhone.
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Related: existing entry "Software Factory paradigm" in this batch — COMPLEMENTS