datasette-agent-edit 0.1a0
Simon Willison releases datasette-agent-edit 0.1a0, a base plugin for Datasette Agent that provides storage-agnostic file-editing tools (view, str_replace, insert) inspired by Claude's text editor.
Release: datasette-agent-edit 0.1a0
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7th June 2026
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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.
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