alt Hacker NewsShow HN: Autotab – Programmable AI browser for turning web tasks into APIs
Hey HN, we're Alexi and Jonas the co-founders of Autotab (https://autotab.com). Autotab is a chrome-based browser you can teach to do complex tasks, with a simple API for running them from your app or backend.
Here is a walkthrough of how it works: https://youtu.be/63co74JHy1k, and you can try it for free at https://autotab.com by downloading the app.
Why a dedicated editor?
The number one blocker we've found in building more flexible, agentic automations is performance quality BY FAR (https://www.langchain.com/stateofaiagents#barriers-and-chall...). For all the talk of cost, latency, and safety, the fact is most people are still just struggling to get agents to work. The keys to solving reliability are better models, yes, but also intent specification. Even humans don't zero-shot these tasks from a prompt. They need to be shown how to perform them, and then refined with question-asking + feedback over time. It is also quite difficult to formulate complete requirements on the spot from memory.
The editor makes it easy to build the specification up as you step through your workflow, while generating successful task trajectories for the model. This is the only way we've been able to get the reliability we need for production use cases.
But why build a browser?
Autotab started as a Chrome extension (with a Show HN post! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37943931). As we iterated with users, we realized that we needed to focus on creating the control surface for intent specification, and that being stuck in a chrome sidepanel wasn't going to work. We also knew that we needed a level of control for the model that we couldn't get without owning the browser. In Autotab, the browser becomes a canvas on which the user and the model are taking turns showing and explaining the task.
Key features:
1. Self-healing automations that don't break when sites change
2. Dedicated authoring tool that builds memory for the model while defining steps for the automation
3. Control flows and deep configurability to keep automations on track, even when navigating complex reasoning tasks
4. Works with any website (no site-specific APIs needed)
5. Runs securely in the cloud or locally
6. Simple REST API + client libraries for Python, Node
We'd love to get any early feedback from the HN community, ideas for where you'd like the product to go, or experiences in this space. We will be in the comments for the next few hours to respond!
Comments
I love the idea - owning the browser definitely seems like the right approach.
I tried it out on a workflow I've been manually piecing together and it gave me a bunch of "Error encountered, contact support" messages when doing things like clicking on a form input field, or even a button.
The more complex "Instruction" block worked correctly instead (literally things like "click the "Sign In" button), but then I ran out of the 5 minutes of free run time when trying to go through the full flow. I expect this kind of thing will be fixed soon, as it grows.
In terms of ultimate utility, what I really want is something which can export scripts that run entirely locally, but falling back to the more dynamic AI enhanced version when an error is encountered. I would want AutoTab to generate the workflow which I could then run on my own hardware in bulk.
Anyway, great work! This is definitely the best implementation I've seen of that glimpsed future of capable AI web browsing agents.
Very neat in theory but I'm failing to find any technical details.
Which layer is the automation happening? Inside using Dev tools? Multiple?
What is the self-healing mechanic? I'm guessing invoking an LLM to find what happened and fix it?
I guess what I'm wondering is. Is this some sort of hybrid between computer use and Dev tools usage?
This is awesome. I was just trying to get a rudimentary version of this for some "user" interaction heavy data extraction. Definitely giving it a try.
For a case with lots of requests how does Autotab handle ip-blocking? Does each run use a different portal instance?
I see it's able to perform data extraction, but what if you wanted to enter in data from another system, or generated by an LLM during the workflow?
You say "try it for free" but your website has no pricing information at all. Is this free for just a while? Free forever? What is your monetization strategy?
Can I point it at my own LLM or am I locked into using OpenAI?
Pretty slick. I recorded a session for ordering from a restaurant website, and it did repeat the entire workflow. It had some issues with a modal popped up but all in all well done! We have been trying to robotify the task of ordering from restaurant for our clients and seems like your solution can work well for us. I am guessing that you want your users to use Autotab browser, what is use for API?
Looks nice. Anybody else in this space? This one is on the pricier end but I’m just a single user so maybe not the target customer
If this was an OSS project automating a specific service many HN-ers would come and bleet about TOS violations & being scared/wary of C&Ds.
How does this not violate TOS? Do you have legal protection set up from megacorps trying to bully you with legal threats?
Automation despite TOS via Adversarial Interop should be a Digital Human Right. Godspeed.
This is awesome! What is your most common use case? Have you thought of competing with https://scribehow.com/ in the documentation space?