Claude in Chrome

Web devs are going to have to get used to robots consuming our web apps.

We'll have to start documenting everything we're deploying, in detail either that or design it in an easy to parse form by an automated browser.

Actually, you don't need to do anything of the sort! Nobody is owed an easy ride to other people's stuff.

Plus, if the magic technology is indeed so incredible, why would we need to do anything differently? Surely it will just be able to consume whatever a human could use themselves without issues.

Forget documenting it. I want an army of robot idiots who have never seen my app before to click every interface element in the wrong order like they were high and lobotomized. Let the chaos reign. Fuzz every combination of everything that I would never have expected when I built it.

As NASA said after the shuttle disaster, "It was a failure of imagination."

> Nobody is owed an easy ride to other people's stuff.

If your website doesn't have a relevant profit model or competition then sure. If you run a SaaS business and your customer wants to do some of their own analytics or automation with a model it's going be hard to say no in the future. If you're selling tickets on a website and block robots you'll lose money. etc

If this is something people learn to use in Excel or Google Docs they'll start expecting some way to do so with their company data in your SaaS products, or you better build a chat model with equivalent capabilities. Both would benefit from documentation.

Get ready for ToS changes forbidding robots from using web pages.

Unless they pay for access, of course.

Browsing a website is not an affront to the owner of the website.

This is a nice use case. It really shows how miserably bad the state of the art in UI testing is. A separation between the application logic and its user interactions would help a lot with being able to test them without the actual UI elements. But that's not what most frameworks give you, nor how most apps are designed.

It's not unreasonable to think that "is [software] easy or hard for an LLM agent to consume and manipulate" will become a competitive differentiator for SaaS products, especially enterprise ones.

Honestly that last paragraph is absolutely true. In general, you shouldn't have to do anything.

If your website is hard for an AI like Claude Sonnet 4.5 to use today, then it probably is hard for a lot of your users to use too.

The exceptions would be sites that intentionally try to make the user's life harder by attempting to stifle the user's AI agent's usability.

Maybe, but it sure makes all the hyped claims around LLMs seem like lies. If they're smarter than a Ph.D student why can't they use software designed to be used by high school dropouts?