Simon Willison’s Weblog

I'm planning several plugins for Datasette Agent which can make edits to existing pieces of text - things like collaborative Markdown editing, updating large SQL queries, and editing SVG files.

Agentic editing of text is a little tricky to get right. My favorite published design for this is for the Claude text editor, which implements the following tools:

• view - view sections of a file, with line numbers added to every line.
• str_replace - find an exact old_str and replace it with new_str - fail if the original string is not unique
• insert - insert the specified text after the specified line number

Rather than recreate these patterns for every plugin that needs them I decided to create this base plugin, datasette-agent-edit, which implements the core tools in a way that allows them to be adapted for other plugins.