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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

#62

Post by amarsharma »

jonasnelle wrote: post #52
amarsharma wrote: post #46

Been working in this space for almost 9 years and written a lot of scrappers and web automations for various clients, I am really excited to build something like this too. Are you guys hiring? Would love to chat.

We are hiring. Feel free to reach out at contact@autotab.com

Sweet, I have emailed you. Subject: "Amar from Hacker News"

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

#64

Post by jonasnelle »

thelastparadise wrote: post #58
jonasnelle wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Autotab is definitely a hybrid approach, because when it comes to deciding where on the page to take an action, Autotab has to be fast & cheap (humans are both of those) while also being robust to changes. The solution we use is a "ladder of compute" where Autotab uses everything from really fast heuristics and local models up to the biggest frontier models, depending on how difficult the task is. For instance, if Au…

So no computer use (pixel-level understanding). That's disappointing as the devtools approach always has limitations. Kura agents, Runner H, and scrapybara will all end up more reliable than you.

If by pixel level you mean vision-first understanding and control of the UI then you’ve misunderstood my comment - Autotab primarily uses vision to reason about screens and take action.

You can also use Anthropic’s Computer Use model directly in Autotab via the instruct feature - our users find it most helpful for handling specific subtasks that are complex to spell out, like picking a date in a calendar.

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

#65

Post by jonasnelle »

_1tem wrote: post #60
jonasnelle wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks! Our most common use cases are repetitive tasks people have at work, think updating Hubspot with analytics data from an internal tool or reconciling payments between an invoicing system, a payment system and a CRM. Haven’t done a lot with Scribe-like documentation cases. Given the pace at which this technology is developing we’re focused on making Autotab really good at the most economically valuable tasks.

How on earth does this help with reconciling payments? Can Autotab also recognize "this transaction belongs to this invoice" or does it just copy and paste all transaction and invoice data into a spreadsheet for manual reconciliation?

Yes, Autotab can reason over the state of applications and the data it is seeing. You can also teach it to do certain steps only in specific cases.

If you wanted Autotab to reconcile payments you would teach it to go to wherever the payments are listed eg a banking app. There you would have it iterate through the unreconciled payments. For each payment you’d have Autotab go to the invoicing tool and look up any details from the payment (eg IBAN, information from the reference number, amount, etc) to find the matching customer and invoice. This is where most of the reasoning happens - you can teach Autotab what counts as sufficiently close to be a match with prompts and examples. Then you can have Autotab mark the invoice as paid and go back to the payment app and mark the payment with the invoice number it grabbed from the matched payment.

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

#66

Post by jonasnelle »

surrTurr wrote: post #59

MacBook Pro m3 max; latest macos version: Autotab has exited due to multiple fatal errors. Please contact support for assistance: contact@autotab.com.

Sorry about that! I don't see any matching errors from 2 hours ago in our logs - if you reach out to the contact@ email address with the email you used in Autotab, I'd be happy to take a closer look

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

#70

Post by alexirobbins »

linuxrebe1 wrote: post #69

One thing I would recommend. Install instructions for Linux/Windows/Mac. Not finding them in the documentation.

Thanks for the note, we will try to make the install instructions clearer. The desktop app is available via a download button on the homepage: https://autotab.com
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