Simon Willison’s Weblog

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I've been upgrading a ton of Datasette plugins recently for compatibility with the Datasette 1.0a20 release from last week - 35 so far.

A lot of the work is very repetitive so I've been outsourcing it to Codex CLI. Here's the recipe I've landed on:

codex exec --dangerously-bypass-approvals-and-sandbox \ 'Run the command tadd and look at the errors and then read ~/dev/datasette/docs/upgrade-1.0a20.md and apply fixes and run the tests again and get them to pass.  Also delete the .github directory entirely and replace it by running this:  cp -r ~/dev/ecosystem/datasette-os-info/.github .  Run a git diff against that to make sure it looks OK - if there are any notable differences e.g. switching from Twine to the PyPI uploader or deleting code that does a special deploy or configures something like  playwright include that in your final report.  If the project still uses setup.py then edit that new test.yml and publish.yaml to mention setup.py not pyproject.toml  If this project has pyproject.toml make sure the license line in that looks like this:  license = "Apache-2.0"  And remove any license thing from the classifiers= array  Update the Datasette dependency in pyproject.toml or setup.py to "datasette>=1.0a21"  And make sure requires-python is >=3.10'

I featured a simpler version of this prompt in my Datasette plugin upgrade video, but I've expanded it quite a bit since then.

At one point I had six terminal windows open running this same prompt against six different repos - probably my most extreme case of parallel agents yet.

Animated GIF demo. Six terminal windows are arranged in a 3x2 grid, each one of them is running the above prompt and working its way through making modifications to one of six different projects: datasette-extract, datasette-create-view, datasette-write, datasette-secrets, datasette-public, and datasette-write-ui.

Here are the six resulting commits from those six coding agent sessions:

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