Have your agent record video demos of its work with shot-scraper video
Simon Willison · Simon Willison · 2026-06-30
Simon Willison releases shot-scraper 1.10 with a new `video` command that enables coding agents to record Playwright-driven browser demos from a YAML storyboard, with the demo storyboard itself generated autonomously by GPT-5.5 xhigh in Codex Desktop.
Appears in
Extraction
Topics: coding-agentsagentic-engineeringdeveloper-toolsplaywrightshot-scraper
Claims
- shot-scraper 1.10 introduces a `video` command that records browser sessions defined by a YAML storyboard file using Playwright.
- GPT-5.5 xhigh running in Codex Desktop autonomously generated the YAML storyboard for the demo video from a natural-language prompt pointing it at the branch and tool help output.
- Playwright 1.61.0 resolved the final technical blockers—fixed video width and leading white frames—enabling the feature to ship.
- A CLI tool's --help output can serve as an embedded skill file, providing coding agents enough context to use the tool without separate documentation.
- The feature would likely not have been built without coding agent support, as it had been stalled in an open issue since February 2024.
Key quotes
I really like this pattern where the --help output for a command provides enough detail that a coding agent can use it - it works kind of like bundling a SKILL.md file directly inside the tool.
This is a great example of the kind of feature that I almost certainly wouldn't have taken on without coding agent support.
I've written before about the importance of having coding agents produce demos of their work; this is my latest attempt at enabling them to do that.