{"slug": "show-hn-simulate-an-engineering-blog-or-an-idea-or-an-incident", "title": "Show HN: Simulate an engineering blog, or an idea or an incident", "summary": "A developer released sim-xp, a tool that uses AI agents to convert engineering blog posts, postmortems, or short prompts into a validated playbook.json file that can be run as an interactive simulation in a browser player. The story-to-playbook skill installs via `npx skills add smarchone/sim-xp --skill story-to-playbook -g` and is invoked in Claude Code with a URL or prompt, such as the GitHub Oct 21 post-incident analysis or a Postgres-as-job-queue load test. Playbooks can be hosted in a public GitHub repo, like smarchone/simxp-playbooks, and imported into the player's Library or run directly via a URL fragment.", "body_md": "**Simulate a blog, an incident or a load test.**\n\nA new way for engineers to share and build experience. Agents turn any blog, incident or concept into a simulation that brings you closer to reality, and saves you the reading.\n\n```\nexperience ──encode──▶ playbook.json ──run──▶ simulation\n```\n\n**Start playing:** [https://smarchone.github.io/sim-xp/v2/](https://smarchone.github.io/sim-xp/v2/) · **About:** [https://smarchone.github.io/sim-xp/](https://smarchone.github.io/sim-xp/)\n\n- There's a gap between reading about a system and experiencing it live.\n- Simulations close that gap. Not exact, but much closer.\n- Agents make it fast: one story in, one simulation out.\n\nThe `story-to-playbook` skill turns a blog post, postmortem, concept or short prompt into a validated\n`playbook.json`. Install it once:\n\n```\nnpx skills add smarchone/sim-xp --skill story-to-playbook -g\n```\n\nThen give it a story in Claude Code:\n\n```\n/story-to-playbook https://github.blog/news-insights/company-news/oct21-post-incident-analysis/\n/story-to-playbook \"Postgres as a job queue, load tested until it breaks\"\n/story-to-playbook \"How a Kafka consumer rebalance storm starts and ends\"\n```\n\nOpen the file in the [player](https://smarchone.github.io/sim-xp/v2/) (drop it on the page, or *Open file…* in\nthe side panel) and press Space.\n\nA library of playbooks can be hosted as a public Github repo.\n\neg: [smarchone/simxp-playbooks](https://github.com/smarchone/simxp-playbooks)\n\nImport it in the [player](https://smarchone.github.io/sim-xp/v2/):\n\n`side panel → *Library* → type the repo name → Add`\n\nCan also run a playbook directly via URL eg:\n\n `https://smarchone.github.io/sim-xp/v2/#smarchone/simxp-playbooks:postgres-queue-load-test`\n\nPart of [agentic experiences](https://smarchone.github.io/agentic-experiences): accelerate learning with agents.", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/show-hn-simulate-an-engineering-blog-or-an-idea-or-an-incident", "canonical_source": "https://github.com/smarchone/sim-xp", "published_at": "2026-10-19 03:05:04+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-10-19 03:18:32.286406+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["ai-agents", "ai-tools", "developer-tools"], "entities": ["sim-xp", "story-to-playbook", "Claude Code", "GitHub", "Postgres", "Kafka", "smarchone/simxp-playbooks"], "also_reported_by": [], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/show-hn-simulate-an-engineering-blog-or-an-idea-or-an-incident", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/show-hn-simulate-an-engineering-blog-or-an-idea-or-an-incident.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/show-hn-simulate-an-engineering-blog-or-an-idea-or-an-incident.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/show-hn-simulate-an-engineering-blog-or-an-idea-or-an-incident.jsonld"}}