Show HN: Spegel, a Terminal Browser That Uses LLMs to Rewrite Webpages

this is another layer of abstraction on top of an already broken system. you're running html through an llm to get markdown that gets rendered in a terminal browser. that's like... three format conversions just to read text. the original web had simple html that was readable in any terminal browser already. now they arent designed as documents anymore but rather designed as applications that happen to deliver some content as a side effect

That's the world we live in. You can either not have access to content or you must accept abstractions to remove all the bad decisions browser vendors have forced on us the last 30 years to support ad-browsing.

> this is another layer of abstraction on top of an already broken system

pretty much like all modern computing then, hey.

Think of it as a secretary that is transforming and formatting information. You may desire for the original medium to be something like what you want but you don’t get that so you can get a cheap dumber secretary instead.

If the web site is a SPA that is hydrated using an API it would be conceivable that the LLM can build a reusable interface around the API while taking inspiration from the original page. That interface can then be stored in some cache.

I'm not saying it's necessarily a good idea but perhaps a bad/fun idea that can inspire good ideas?

I take it you never use "Reader mode" in your browser?

I 100% agree -- but still I find this a feature and not a bug. It's always an arms race, and I like this shot fired.