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Show HN: Autotab – Programmable AI browser for turning web tasks into APIs

159 points jonasnelle | 1 comments | 20 Nov 24 20:22 UTC | HN request time: 0.221s | 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. wruza ◴[21 Nov 24 18:33 UTC] No.42207206[source]▶
Honestly, the video feels like just any low/nocode tutorial video in a sense “that we’re going to automate something” and a minute later we are copying urls into some complex forms and following the voiceover of something you cannot grasp the meaning of. A little intro of what exactly we are doing would help.

I cold-watched only half of it, without reading any info on the project, but that’s how everyone does it, I guess.

But I get the idea. Automate by example with automatic scenario builder and fuzzy matching ui via ai.

As someone who works in automation, I (again, blindly) suggest looking into anti-detection and human behavior like mouse movements, typing errors and pauses, because that’s what your (and all ours) main enemy will be in the next decade.

All in all, this is in high demand, afaiu. I tend to use a classic ML approach for that (avoiding browser automation cause it obviously only works in a browser and limits/divides the area of application), but would love to try something that self-heals on site changes. Although I think I’d better use something that can detect changes and reconfigure my ML params rather than using it directly, cause I don’t really trust modern AI to free-float in runtime, and also costs.