31–40 of 131 posts
Related: https://playwright.dev/ has a built-in code generator. In *my opinion*, it's also more pleasant to work with than Selenium.
We picked Selenium because it seems much more widely used at least in the Python world (selenium has about 10x more downloads on PyPI than playwright). My guess is that's at least partly because Playwright is more focused on the JS/TS ecosystem and testing.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Selectors have been our primary focus so far – they're notoriously finicky! Our roadmap includes more extensive use of AI, both as embedded intelligence, and in the code generation process. For example, one thing we've heard from heavy users of browser automation is that maintenance becomes the largest cost. Self-healing automations will be able to either fix themselves, our give you an alert with a suggested fix to…
The "self-healing" sounds very interesting. I've tried to think, myself, how to approach this in a chrome extension running dom selectors in automations. Curious if you have any high-level thoughts/findings in this area?
I don't get why people still use XPaths, CSS selectors or HTML IDs to identify elements, even when they are "recorded". Please please please just use my https://github.com/mherrmann/selenium-python-helium instead. It makes so much more sense.
Please make the switch to selenium 4, so that it is kept up to date with the rest of the selenium ecosystem e.g. undetectable browsers
why does it require logging into google to use?
BTW I don’t normally use Chrome- I know why you would start with that, but it would be great to see a Firefox or even Safari version of this.
I was curious about the YC backing and realised that you're the founders of https://www.ztool.co . Did you pivot or is this a complementary prodcut to ztool? Would love to hear more about your journey :)
This is definitely more of a pivot, though the ZTool product also went through a few bigger iterations itself. I think my learnings from building and talking to users the last few months boil down to two main things that led me to work on autotab.
1. AI-generated software isn't ready for non-technical users. With ZTool I was initially focused on making it easy for people who don't know how to code to create automations. For the reasons we talked about above, I think having the model's output be code is best for now, so autotab is focused on users that can review and tweak Python code.
2. How you communicate intent matters. There is a surprising amount of mental work required to go from "this task is annoying" to creating a structured representation of it (c.f. the whole world of process automation). AI demos have focused on short prompts to communicate intent, but those don't work that well for more complex domains. Using the browser to communicate intent seems really powerful because it's so intuitive/familiar.Awesome. I'm mostly curious what the path to monetization for this is
Longer term I think you'd monetize the infrastructure to run the automations at scale in the cloud.