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Launch HN: Kampala (YC W26) – Reverse-Engineer Apps into APIs

zatanna.ai

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Re: Launch HN: Kampala (YC W26) – Reverse-Engineer Apps into APIs

#11

Post by alexblackwell_ »

Barbing wrote: post #5

Zatanna Kampala (had to double check it wasn’t Harris) Just mulling these names over, how’d you come up with them? PS: clear value prop!

Zatanna is a DC comic book character. I’m not sure if either of us have even read comics, so not sure where that came from. For Kampala, when I started this I was trying Conductor for the first time. The generated workspace name was Kampala (the capital of Uganda). We even have a 3rd name. We actually incorporated as NoPoll. That one’s a bit less inspiring though lol.

Re: Launch HN: Kampala (YC W26) – Reverse-Engineer Apps into APIs

#13

Post by benagents »

Great job Alex!

Think this is really interesting especially for creating datasets. Proxyman was always hard to use for me, so connecting it to a MCP was something I have been waiting for.

Quick question: How do you handle session re-auth mid-script?

Congrats on the launch.. I need that conference script!

Re: Launch HN: Kampala (YC W26) – Reverse-Engineer Apps into APIs

#14

Post by iconicBark »

madradavid wrote: post #12

Congratulations on the launch. Totally unrelated, I am just curious about why you chose the name, as someone who is Ugandan and was born in raised in Kampala (which is the Capital City of Uganda BTW). Congratulations again.

I was caught off guard as well!!

Re: Launch HN: Kampala (YC W26) – Reverse-Engineer Apps into APIs

#16

Post by alexblackwell_ »

ksri wrote: post #6

Related. We have several third party web apps in use. These apps don't expose a public api, but they are all single page web apps. We wanted to connect claude code to these web apps for our limited use case. We opened chrome, navigated the entire website, the downloaded the network tab as an har file. The asked claude to analyze and document the apis as an openapi json. Worked amazing. Next step - we wrote a small py…

Super cool. I think this is where most automation is heading . Would be curious if you could one-shot the auth flow using Kampala and completely ditch the browser. Also FWIW you can import HAR into Kampala and we have a few nice tools (like being able to a/b test payloads/replay requests) that meaningfully reduce integration time.

Re: Launch HN: Kampala (YC W26) – Reverse-Engineer Apps into APIs

#17

Post by alexblackwell_ »

madradavid wrote: post #12

Congratulations on the launch. Totally unrelated, I am just curious about why you chose the name, as someone who is Ugandan and was born in raised in Kampala (which is the Capital City of Uganda BTW). Congratulations again.

It was the (generated) name of the Conductor workspace when I started the project. We were going to rename it before launch but the name stuck lol :)

Re: Launch HN: Kampala (YC W26) – Reverse-Engineer Apps into APIs

#19

Post by alexblackwell_ »

dataviz1000 wrote: post #8

I built the same thing as this just for websites. [0] I'm more interested in using Claude recursion to tune itself -- the agent writes itself, the agent -- than hacking websites. It is a good demonstration that 47 iterations of a recursive Claude agent writing itself to decompose any transport. I've tested it against YouTube, Twitch, Ticketmaster, and Yahoo Finance. It will detect any transport like JSON, WebSocket,…

We’ve essentially been using that “recursion” to tune our agent. Having the agent build itself is not something I would have ever thought of though. Curious if you find it genuinely creates specific enough tools for it to be worth the setup time? I have a claude skill that takes in a chat and then offers tools/fixes to system prompt. Have found that + the anthropic harness engineering blogs to be super useful in making the agent actually do the work.

Re: Launch HN: Kampala (YC W26) – Reverse-Engineer Apps into APIs

#20

Post by IMTDb »

Congratulations.

How do you handle SSL pinning ? Most of the apps I interact with have some sort of SSL pinning, which is the hard part to circumvent. I tried Kampala but got stuck at the usual place; as soon as I enable it, chatGPT stops working. Most of my iPhone apps stop responding etc.

I would love to try using this tool to build an agent that can simply subscribe me to my gym lessons instead of me having to go on the horrible app. But even that relatively simple (iOS) app stopped working as soon as I enabled the proxy.

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