In working on Rodney I found out that the Claude Code for web environment has a Chrome browser installed already. It's a shame you can't see its output directly - even if it takes a screenshot there's no easy way to view it other than having it commit and push that to a branch in GitHub.

Yes, very much so. It's a much thinner, less feature-rich alternative.

It would be interesting to experiment with Jupyter notebooks as an alternative that could work in Claude Code for web.

I had a poke around just now and couldn't find an existing CLI tool that lets you build those up a section at a time in the same way as Showboat. I did find this Python library though:

    uv run --with nbformat python -c '
    import nbformat
    nb = nbformat.v4.new_notebook()
    nb.cells.append(nbformat.v4.new_markdown_cell("# NBTerm Exploration"))
    nb.cells.append(nbformat.v4.new_code_cell("import sys\nprint(f\"Python {sys.version}\")"))
    nb.cells.append(nbformat.v4.new_code_cell("x = [i**2 for i in range(10)]\nprint(x)"))
    nb.cells.append(nbformat.v4.new_code_cell("sum(x)"))
    with open("demo.ipynb", "w") as f:
        nbformat.write(nb, f)
    '

So you could tell the agent to run code like that and then inspect the `demo.ipynb` notebook later on. It doesn't show the result of evaluating the cells though, you need to run this afterwards to have that happen:

    uv run --with nbformat --with nbclient --with ipykernel python -c '
    import nbformat
    from nbclient import NotebookClient

    nb = nbformat.read("demo.ipynb", as_version=4)
    client = NotebookClient(nb, timeout=60)
    client.execute()
    nbformat.write(nb, "demo_executed.ipynb")
    '

My problem is that I work in dozens of different repos generally using Claude Code for web, which doesn't have a way to install extra global skills yet.

I don't want to duplicate my skills into all those repos (and keep them updated) so I prefer the "uvx tool --help" pattern.

They kind of were one-shotted by Claude. The value is in coming up with a consistent design and good enough --help that you can prompt:

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

The help text effectively doubles as a skill.

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

I'm dabbling with Go at the moment for small tools, mainly as an excuse to learn a new language but also because having a single standalone binary is convenient for shuttling these tiny little tools around.

... but then I'm mostly running them with "uvx name-of-tool" because it turns out Python's packaging infrastructure for binary tools is so good!

Depends which definition of RAG you're talking about.

RAG was originally about adding extra information to the context so that an LLM could answer questions that needed that extra context.

On that basis I guess you could call skills a form of RAG, but honestly at that point the entire field of "context engineering" can be classified as RAG too.

Maybe RAG as a term is obsolete now, since it really just describes how we use LLMs in 2025.

This is the only valid and reasonable criticism I've seen here so far, kudos to you.

299 is, indeed, inaccessible for many people. But, the devs live in places where things cost more, so its also a tiny price compared to the relative value that they provide.

I do think that some sort of geo-relative pricing structure would be worth looking into, but how does one even implement something like that? Is there something that makes it all "just work"? I suspect not. Moreover, the devs have already given away so much of their time - it doesnt make much sense for them to invest even more of it into designing a pricing system like this, from which they are going to possibly earn only a negligible amount from. Perhaps this is a problem that you might like to address yourself?

Anyway, the devs are very clear that most people should never need the Pro license. 95+% of the functionality and value is available for free in the open-source library. Use it, enjoy it, learn from it, profit from it!

Datastar is one of the few projects in the web ecosystem in years that feels like a paradigm shift for the better.

The author (Delaney Gillilan) has put a lot of thought into how modern web development should be done from first principles, while leveraging core web technologies like SSE, and eschewing complexity as much as possible. His proposed GoNaDs stack[1] enables some truly impressive web applications. I highly recommend watching this talk[2] to get a sense of what's possible.

I wish the best of luck to the core team and contributors, and hope that this framework, or something like it, disrupts the modern ecosystem of popular web frameworks and stacks.

[1]: https://gonads.net/

[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0K71AyAF6E4