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Public story · 2026-07-01 · high
Willison's own example storyboard was written entirely by GPT-5.5 xhigh inside Codex Desktop, not by him.
Why now: This lands right as coding agents like GPT-5.5 xhigh get good enough to script their own demo videos, not just write the code they're demoing.
Simon Willison shipped shot-scraper 1.10, adding a video command that turns a storyboard.yml file into a recorded walkthrough of a running web app, per his blog post. That's a real primitive for anyone building with coding agents: instead of trusting an agent's text summary of what it built, you can watch the running thing.
Under the hood it's Playwright driving a browser through a script instead of a person clicking around.
The detail that makes this land: the storyboard script came from GPT-5.5 xhigh, running inside Codex Desktop, not from Willison. The tool built to verify agent output is itself agent-authored, start to finish.
My bet: screenshot diffs and text-based QA checklists start looking thin next to this within the year, for anyone shipping agent-written code to production. Worth watching whether other agent harnesses beyond Codex Desktop pick up the same pattern, or whether it stays a shot-scraper-specific trick.
Each link below shares sources, entities, or timing with this story.
Claude Code supports Playwright / Shared entities / Same source domain / Shared topic / Earlier coverage
Linked by a graph relationship (Claude Code supports Playwright); both cover Codex Desktop, GPT, Simon Willison; reported by the same outlet (simonwillison.net).
Anthropic uses Playwright / Shared entities / Same source domain / Shared topic / What happened next
Linked by a graph relationship (Anthropic uses Playwright); both cover GPT, Simon Willison; reported by the same outlet (simonwillison.net).
Simon Willison released LLM / Shared entities / Same source domain / Shared topic / Earlier coverage
Linked by a graph relationship (Simon Willison released LLM); both cover Playwright, Simon Willison; reported by the same outlet (simonwillison.net).
Claude Code supports Playwright / Shared entities / Same source domain / Shared topic / What happened next
Linked by a graph relationship (Claude Code supports Playwright); both cover GPT, Simon Willison; reported by the same outlet (simonwillison.net).
Claude Code supports Playwright / Shared entities / Shared topic / What happened next / Tension
Linked by a graph relationship (Claude Code supports Playwright); both cover Codex Desktop, GPT; overlapping topics (agent, codex).
Anthropic uses Playwright / Shared entities / Same source domain / What happened next / Tension
Linked by a graph relationship (Anthropic uses Playwright); both cover GPT, Simon Willison; reported by the same outlet (simonwillison.net).
Anthropic uses Playwright / Shared entity: Simon Willison / Same source domain / Shared topic / Earlier coverage / Tension
Linked by a graph relationship (Anthropic uses Playwright); both cover Simon Willison; reported by the same outlet (simonwillison.net).
Simon Willison released LLM / Shared entities / Same source domain / What happened next
Linked by a graph relationship (Simon Willison released LLM); both cover GPT, Simon Willison; reported by the same outlet (simonwillison.net).