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Show HN: Stagehand – an open source browser automation framework powered by AI

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Re: Show HN: Stagehand – an open source browser automation framework powered by AI

#71

Post by hackgician »

asar wrote: post #42

This looks really cool, thanks for sharing! I recently tried to implement a workflow automation using similar frameworks that were playwright or puppeteer based. My goal was to log into a bunch of vendor backends and extract values for reporting (no APIs available). What stopped me entirely were websites that implemented an invisible captcha. They can detect a playwright instance by how it interacts with the DOM. Pre…

Thanks so much! Yes, a lot of antibots are able to detect Playwright based on browser config. Generally, antibots are a good thing -- I think in the future, as web agents become more popular, I'd imagine a fruitful partnership to prevent misuse if it's coming from a trusted web agent v. an unknown one

Re: Show HN: Stagehand – an open source browser automation framework powered by AI

#72

Post by hackgician »

chw9e wrote: post #63
hackgician wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks so much! Our Stagehand MCP server actually won Anthropic's Claude MCP hackathon :) Check it out: https://github.com/browserbase/mcp-server-browserbase/tree/m... We're working on a better computer use integration using Stagehand, def a lot of interesting potential there

The MCP server is useful, I built a demo of converting bug reports into Playwright tests using it - https://qckfx.com/demo

Whoa -- this is so cool! Is this open source? Would love to check it out

Re: Show HN: Stagehand – an open source browser automation framework powered by AI

#73

Post by hackgician »

qeternity wrote: post #60
fbouvier wrote: post #41

Hey Anirudh, Stagehand looks awesome, congrats. Really love the focus on making browser automations more resilient to DOM changes. The act, extract, and observe methods are super clean. You might want to check out Lightpanda ( https://github.com/lightpanda-io/browser ). It's an open-source, lightweight headless browser built from scratch for AI and web automation. It's focused on skipping graphical rendering to make…

I don't really follow: a lot of the fragility of web automation comes from the programmatic vs. visual differences, which VLMs are able to overcome. Skipping the graphical rendering seems to be committing yourself to non-visual hell. The web isn't made for agents and automation. It's made for people.

Yes and no. Getting a VLM to work on the web would definitely be great, but it comes with its own problems, mainly around developing and acting on bounding boxes. We have vision as a default fallback for Stagehand, but we've found that the screenshot sent to the VLM often has to have pre-labeled elements on it. More notably, the screenshot with everything prelabeled leads to a cluttered and unusable image to process. Not pre-labeling runs the risk of missing important elements. I imagine a happy medium where the DOM+a11y tree can be used for candidate generation to a VLM.

Solely depending on a VLM is indeed reminiscent of how humans interact with the web, but when a model thrives with more data, why restrict the data sent to the model?

Re: Show HN: Stagehand – an open source browser automation framework powered by AI

#74

Post by insdev12 »

hackgician wrote: post #65
jerrygoyal wrote: post #30

wow. It's like cursor vs vscode movement but for browser automation and scrapping. Kudos to the author. Are there any other similar tools?

Thanks so much! Crawlspace is pretty sick too, as is Integuru. A lot of people have different takes here on the level of automation to leave up to the user. As a developer building for developers, I wanted to meet in the middle and build off an existing incumbent that most people are likely familiar with already

Yea Integuru is pretty cool: https://github.com/Integuru-AI/Integuru

Re: Show HN: Stagehand – an open source browser automation framework powered by AI

#75

Post by hackgician »

Kostarrr wrote: post #36
mpalmer wrote: post #6

This looks very cool and makes a lot of sense, except for the idea that it should take the place of Playwright et al. Personally I'd love to use this as an intermediate workflow for producing deterministic playwright code, but it looks like this is intended for running directly. I don't think I could plausibly argue for using LLMs at runtime in our test suite at work...

Hi! Kosta from Octomind here. We built basically this: Let an LLM agent take a look at your web page and generate the playwright code to test it. Running the test is just running the deterministic playwright code. Of course, the actual hard work is _maintaining_ end-to-end tests so our agent can do that for you as well. Feel free to check us out, we have a no-hassle free tier.

Octomind is sick, web agents are such an interesting space; would love to talk to you more about challenges you might've faced in building it

Re: Show HN: Stagehand – an open source browser automation framework powered by AI

#76

Post by fidotron »

hackgician wrote: post #66
fidotron wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn’t look like accessing the llmclient for this is possible for external projects in the latest release, as that example takes advantage of being inside the project. (At least working through the quick start guide).

We accidentally didn't release the right types for LLMClient :/ However, if you set the version in package.json to "alpha", it will install what's on the main branch on GitHub, which should have the typing fix there

Yeah I saw it was a recent change in your GitHub and was happily running your examples.

To be honest I took about 2 minutes of playing around to get annoyed with the inaccuracies of the locally hosted model for that, so I get why you encourage the other approaches.

Re: Show HN: Stagehand – an open source browser automation framework powered by AI

#77

Post by mrbluecoat »

hackgician wrote: post #13
andrewmcwatters wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems to me like Selenium would have been a more appropriate API to extend from, then. Playwright, despite whatever people want it to be otherwise, is explicitly positioned for testing, first. People in the browser automation space consistently ignore this, for whatever reason. Though, it's right on their site in black and white.

Appreciate the feedback. Our take is that Playwright is an open-sourced library with a lot of built-in features that make building with it a lot easier, so it's definitely an easier starting point for us

Working with Selenium has always been painful for me so I for one thank you for providing an alternate solution.

Re: Show HN: Stagehand – an open source browser automation framework powered by AI

#78

Post by temuze »

hackgician wrote: post #64
owebmaster wrote: post #55

Any attempt on doing something similar but as a browser extension?

That's definitely compelling, but not something we have in mind for the immediate future. Let me know if you end up building something here!

I'm currently working on it :)

See you in two weeks I hope

Re: Show HN: Stagehand – an open source browser automation framework powered by AI

#79

Post by cjonas »

andrewmcwatters wrote: post #18
cjonas wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you get by when every major sites starts blocking headless browsers? A good example right now is Zillow, but I foresee a world where big chunks of the internet are behind captcha and bot detection

That's not really a problem for Stagehand. It's a problem for Selenium, Playwright, Puppeteer and others at the browser automation library level.

it's not really a problem for Playwrite, because Playwrite is really intended to be run by the owners of the website, not as a webscraper.

It may become a real problem for the usefulness of this style of LLM driven browsing.

Re: Show HN: Stagehand – an open source browser automation framework powered by AI

#80

Post by andrewmcwatters »

cjonas wrote: post #79
andrewmcwatters wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not really a problem for Stagehand. It's a problem for Selenium, Playwright, Puppeteer and others at the browser automation library level.

it's not really a problem for Playwrite, because Playwrite is really intended to be run by the owners of the website, not as a webscraper. It may become a real problem for the usefulness of this style of LLM driven browsing.

Right, but I mean it's a plugin issue outside of Stagehand. That's currently how the space treats the issue.

There are plugins that extend the major browser automation libraries to do this sort of thing.

And undetectable browser automation doesn't use Playwright, Puppeteer, or Selenium at all.

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