Showboat and Rodney, so agents can demo what they've built
Details
- External ID
- 46963887
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- Showboat and Rodney, so agents can demo what they've built
- Website domain
- simonwillison.net
- Launched
- Feb. 10, 2026
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 91
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.8827493261455526
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:25 p.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:25 p.m.
Enrichment
- Theme
- ai agent infrastructure and tooling
- Vertical
- Horizontal
- Function
- Agent / copilot
- Audience
- Developer
- AI stance
- AI-native
- Project type
- Commercial product
- Normalized one-liner
- demo platform for agent-built projects
- Manually corrected
- False
Could you build this?
Yes These are straightforward CLI utilities written in Go and Python to execute shell commands, format markdown output, and automate headless browser snapshots via Playwright or Chrome DevTools Protocol.
Discussion
20 comments analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: marimo notebooks, Playwright, Selenium, reStructuredText, AsciiDoc
Concerns raised: Quality of free LLM models inadequate for coding tasks, AI struggles to understand test failures vs timeouts in e2e tests, Markdown lacks features needed for documentation compared to richer formats, Multiple incompatible Markdown forks reduce compatibility
Feature requests: Make blog responsive for wider screens, Array-like interface in addition to stack-like for accessing markdown blocks, Increase max content width for comfortable reading on large displays
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one — 56 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #3 of 57 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 79 days after the earliest competitor.
- Shark Tank but you pitch your idea to indie hackers · hn · 2026-07-01 · 9 upvotes · similarity 0.38
- ps-Agent · github · 2026-09-26 · 28 upvotes · similarity 0.37
- Dank-AI · hn · 2025-11-23 · 8 upvotes · similarity 0.36
- Future Crew's 1993 Second Reality, rebuilt by AI agents, no emulation · hn · 2026-08-20 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.36
- Bough, the agent I built to replace Claude Code at work · hn · 2026-09-15 · 10 upvotes · similarity 0.36
- If You Want Coherence, Orchestrate a Team of Rivals: Multi-Agent " · hn · 2026-01-28 · 10 upvotes · similarity 0.35
- I built a game where AI agents compete to ship code · hn · 2026-05-06 · 10 upvotes · similarity 0.35
- Standout - The Agentic Hiring Marketplace · yc · 2026-05-07 · 14 upvotes · similarity 0.34
Other launches for this product
- No other launches for this product.
Same idea, different domain
Nobody's really built a agent / copilot tool for Agriculture yet.