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159 points jonasnelle | 4 comments | | HN request time: 0.851s | source

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!

1. adamkhakhar ◴[] No.42200804[source]
This is awesome! What is your most common use case? Have you thought of competing with https://scribehow.com/ in the documentation space?
replies(1): >>42200907 #
2. jonasnelle ◴[] No.42200907[source]
Thanks! Our most common use cases are repetitive tasks people have at work, think updating Hubspot with analytics data from an internal tool or reconciling payments between an invoicing system, a payment system and a CRM.

Haven’t done a lot with Scribe-like documentation cases. Given the pace at which this technology is developing we’re focused on making Autotab really good at the most economically valuable tasks.

replies(1): >>42203736 #
3. myflash13 ◴[] No.42203736[source]
How on earth does this help with reconciling payments? Can Autotab also recognize "this transaction belongs to this invoice" or does it just copy and paste all transaction and invoice data into a spreadsheet for manual reconciliation?
replies(1): >>42204731 #
4. jonasnelle ◴[] No.42204731{3}[source]
Yes, Autotab can reason over the state of applications and the data it is seeing. You can also teach it to do certain steps only in specific cases.

If you wanted Autotab to reconcile payments you would teach it to go to wherever the payments are listed eg a banking app. There you would have it iterate through the unreconciled payments. For each payment you’d have Autotab go to the invoicing tool and look up any details from the payment (eg IBAN, information from the reference number, amount, etc) to find the matching customer and invoice. This is where most of the reasoning happens - you can teach Autotab what counts as sufficiently close to be a match with prompts and examples. Then you can have Autotab mark the invoice as paid and go back to the payment app and mark the payment with the invoice number it grabbed from the matched payment.