Simon Willison · · 1 min read

datasette-agent-edit 0.1a0

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7th June 2026

Release datasette-agent-edit 0.1a0 — Storage-agnostic file-editing tools (view / str_replace / insert) for Datasette Agent plugins

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.

Posted 7th June 2026 at 11:56 pm

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