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Show HN: Tasker – An open-source desktop agent for browser and OS automation

15 pointsby schnetzlerjoeyesterday at 8:53 PM10 commentsview on HN

Hi HN

I recently got married, promptly had a bit of a meltdown, and decided to lock myself in a room and build for a while.

At the same time, I was trying to outbound sell for my startup and kept running into the same problem: I wanted an automation tool that could actually use my computer like a person. Click through UIs, copy/paste between apps, handle messy workflows — not just APIs and webhooks.

I couldn’t find anything that felt: - consumer-friendly (non-technical) - local-first - flexible enough for real-world, UI-driven tasks

So I challenged myself to see how far I could get building an open-source, desktop automation app powered by AI. That’s Tasker.

I’ve been using it daily for ~2–3 weeks for sales workflows, and my father has been using it to help generate estimates for his HVAC business. It’s still early (still needs to expand to general OS), but it’s already replaced a lot of manual work for us in browser.

One thing that’s become very clear: a cloud/deployable version that can run on cron or be triggered via HTTP would unlock a lot of use cases. I’m not totally sure where this goes next, but I wanted to share it early and get feedback.

Would love thoughts on: - What workflows you’d actually trust something like this with - Desktop vs cloud tradeoffs - Where this breaks down in practice - Whether this feels useful or just scary

Repo and docs are linked on the site.


Comments

IntelliAvatartoday at 1:49 AM

This looks great.

One thing I’ve been bitten by with desktop agents is execution-time safety: the plan is correct, but a single malformed path or OS call causes real damage.

Do you enforce any guardrails at the tool boundary (e.g. path sandboxing, network allowlists, dry-run / replay)?

Curious how you’re thinking about this.

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1shooneryesterday at 10:25 PM

>Your data never leaves your computer. Tasker runs entirely on your machine for maximum privacy.

Am I misreading your docs that Tasker actually does not support running local, and in fact requires using either a Google, Anthropic, or OpenAI service?

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juttertoday at 1:26 AM

How on earth did you manage to get this far before learning of the Android app by the same name? You can't call this Tasker.

Are you willing to expand more on the meltdown? Coming to terms with being a grown up? Did your marriage survive?

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Tade0yesterday at 9:53 PM

Not to be confused with Tasker for Android:

https://tasker.joaoapps.com/index.html

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yodonyesterday at 9:19 PM

HN hug of death? Can't open the site

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