Simon Willison — 2026-06-30#

Highlight#

The release of shot-scraper video is a perfect illustration of Simon’s “agentic engineering” workflow, showcasing how he leverages powerful local models like GPT-5.5 to write complex features that he wouldn’t otherwise have time to build. It also demonstrates a brilliant pattern for CLI design: packing detailed examples into --help output so it functions like an embedded skill file for coding agents.

Posts#

Have your agent record video demos of its work with shot-scraper video Simon details the new shot-scraper video command, which uses a storyboard.yml file to drive Playwright and record application demos. He built this entire feature—including the code, documentation, and the Pydantic-validated YAML schema—using GPT-5.5 xhigh in Codex Desktop. He notes that making tools easily usable by coding agents allows them to record their own demos, especially when commands include rich --help text that agents can read directly.