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

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

#11

Post by jonasnelle »

handfuloflight wrote: post #9

I see it's able to perform data extraction, but what if you wanted to enter in data from another system, or generated by an LLM during the workflow?

Data from external systems can be provided to Autotab in the form of CSV files or string inputs, which can be passed to the API to parametrize skills. However, in most cases, ingesting data into Autotab is easiest by just having Autotab navigate to the website where the data is present.

Autotab has a structured type system underlying the workflows, so any data processed in the course of an automation can be referenced in later steps. It's a bit like a fuzzy programming language for automation, and the model generates schemas to ensure data flows reliably through the series of steps.

For example, users often start by collecting information in one system (using an extract step as you mentioned), then cross reference it in another and then submit some data by having Autotab type it into a third system. In Autotab, you can just type @ to reference a variable, each step has access to data from previous steps.

At the end, you can get a dump of all of Autotab's data from a run as a JSON file, or turn specific arrays of data into CSV files using a table step.

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

#12

Post by jonasnelle »

smashah wrote: post #10

If this was an OSS project automating a specific service many HN-ers would come and bleet about TOS violations & being scared/wary of C&Ds. How does this not violate TOS? Do you have legal protection set up from megacorps trying to bully you with legal threats? Automation despite TOS via Adversarial Interop should be a Digital Human Right. Godspeed.

This has been much less of an issue than I would have expected - Autotab is optimized for reasoning heavy tasks in core systems that require high reliability over being really fast at doing giant scrapes. More automating leads in Salesforce, tickets in Jira and data in Airtable than hawking tickets.

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

#13

Post by pacifi30 »

Pretty slick. I recorded a session for ordering from a restaurant website, and it did repeat the entire workflow. It had some issues with a modal popped up but all in all well done! We have been trying to robotify the task of ordering from restaurant for our clients and seems like your solution can work well for us. I am guessing that you want your users to use Autotab browser, what is use for API?

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

#14

Post by jonasnelle »

pacifi30 wrote: post #13

Pretty slick. I recorded a session for ordering from a restaurant website, and it did repeat the entire workflow. It had some issues with a modal popped up but all in all well done! We have been trying to robotify the task of ordering from restaurant for our clients and seems like your solution can work well for us. I am guessing that you want your users to use Autotab browser, what is use for API?

Thanks! We think of the browser as an authoring tool where you create, test and refine skills.

After you've done that, the API is great for cases where you want to incorporate Autotab into a larger data flow or product.

For instance, say Company A has taught Autotab to migrate their customers' data - so their customers just see a sync button in the Company A product, which kicks off a Autotab run via API. Same for restaurant booking, if you'd want that to happen programatically.

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

#15

Post by jonasnelle »

pacifi30 wrote: post #13

Pretty slick. I recorded a session for ordering from a restaurant website, and it did repeat the entire workflow. It had some issues with a modal popped up but all in all well done! We have been trying to robotify the task of ordering from restaurant for our clients and seems like your solution can work well for us. I am guessing that you want your users to use Autotab browser, what is use for API?

Also for the modal popup - this is the kind of issue that goes away in run mode because Autotab will escalate to bigger models to self-heal.

If the modal pops up frequently you can also record an click to dismiss it and make that click optional so Autotab knows to move on if the modal does not pop up sometimes.

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

#18

Post by pacifi30 »

jonasnelle wrote: post #14
pacifi30 wrote: post #13

Pretty slick. I recorded a session for ordering from a restaurant website, and it did repeat the entire workflow. It had some issues with a modal popped up but all in all well done! We have been trying to robotify the task of ordering from restaurant for our clients and seems like your solution can work well for us. I am guessing that you want your users to use Autotab browser, what is use for API?

Thanks! We think of the browser as an authoring tool where you create, test and refine skills. After you've done that, the API is great for cases where you want to incorporate Autotab into a larger data flow or product. For instance, say Company A has taught Autotab to migrate their customers' data - so their customers just see a sync button in the Company A product, which kicks off a Autotab run via API. Same for re…

Understood! How does it work if we have several different restaurants to order from, do I need to record each ordering session and create skills for each restaurant or it can infer on its own given the task to order from a restaurant. Secondly, any docs or samples to see how to integrate this with your API?

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

#19

Post by replwoacause »

alexirobbins wrote: post #17
replwoacause wrote: post #16

Looks nice. Anybody else in this space? This one is on the pricier end but I’m just a single user so maybe not the target customer

Curious, what would you be interested in using Autotab for?

Automating the creation of test orders in our Ecom and ERP tools is one possible use case I can think of, though I’m sure I’d find others in my day to day (possibly around some of the rote tasks I have in Confluence or DevOps)

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

#20

Post by Onavo »

replwoacause wrote: post #16

Looks nice. Anybody else in this space? This one is on the pricier end but I’m just a single user so maybe not the target customer

If we are being honest, most of these browser screen scraping startups will be commoditized the moment OpenAI/Anthropic releases their next model. From my experience, having an in-house smaller model working in tandem with the bigger LLMs don't always necessarily produce a better result because in-context learning is just too powerful. The moment OpenAI releases a new model with a better prior, you will see a lot of these companies quietly swapping out their in-house "edge"/specialized fine tuned models. It's like those PDF data extraction companies that have been launching like crazy, 90% will be pivoting if they don't get enough B2B customers locked in. LLMs unfortunately is winner-take-all with the actual model providers cutting out all the middleman.
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