One of the first problems that come up when you try to automate software development is verification. You might have Codex build you a new button, only for it to be janky.
So teams will have coding agents add screenshots. This helps, a bit? But the further you go down the "software factory" path, the more you get plausible UIs laden with flickers, confusing flows, and unnecessary animations.
A screenshot doesn’t prove a good UX. Many a design sin has been approved based on misleading mockups.
Given that, coding agents should host a preview environment for their proposed PR so we can test changes ourselves. However, this is sometimes overkill or just slow. When you can assign Linear issues to a cloud agent and have them make small additions or fixes independently, opening their preview environments and clicking around to verify very small changes becomes a bottleneck.
Enter demo videos. Any UX-impacting PR should get one. Our software factory (which we call Powerplant) has Claude and Codex cloud agents make them. Here's an example from a simple fix:
Looks good!
No automation is a replacement for a team actually using the product. We need to load up more meaningful changes to see how they feel in practice. But for smaller changes – or first-pass implementations – demo videos surface problems earlier. The goal is improving confidence enough to get improvements merged faster.
Two little bonuses of having your agents attach demo videos:
- The video scripts can also serve as automated tests, if they show an important flow
- This same infrastructure makes it much faster to add a demo video to human-driven PRs
If your team’s coding agents don’t attach demo videos (or you have some other, worse problem) and you’re up for sharing what is and isn’t working in your team’s agentic coding workflows, we’d love to hear about it.