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Launch HN: Intuned (YC S22) – Build and run reliable browser automations as code

intunedhq.com

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Re: Launch HN: Intuned (YC S22) – Build and run reliable browser automations as code

#11

Post by fkilaiwi »

jackienotchan wrote: post #9

I'm always genuinely curious on how startups navigate the founder maze as it helps to break the myth of an overnight success story. Based on your YC page, you went through a couple of pivots over the last years: - 4 years ago: Intuned - The data assistant for engineering leaders [0] - 2 years ago: Intuned - The browser automation platform for developers and product teams [1] - 1 year ago: Intuned Auth Sessions - Buil…

We actually went through 1 hard pivot only, the reset is more about framing the problem as we dug deeper and understood the customers and issue more. As an example, "Intuned Auth Sessions" is just a feature that we still support today! But you are right, being a founder is not easy and the hardest part is figuring out what to build, does it make sense to keep going or should you stop - those are questions I still struggle with until today.

For your question about how is this different - I think if you dig into those product you will see that our focus is different, many of the companies mentioned are focused on powering agents via APIs, some are focused on enabling users to use AI at runtime, we do feel that our product is somewhat differentiated - the closest one is possibly Reworkd and I would still say the product is somewhat different. Now, the hardest part is actually commenting this with customers and the market in general - and there, we have a lot to figure out!

For robots.txt and user-agents question, we think of ourselves as providing infrastructure and flexibility for our customers to do what they want - we do encourage in our docs that they respect robots.txt but we don't enforce it on a platform level.

Appreciate you taking the time to leave this comment - very thoughtful

Re: Launch HN: Intuned (YC S22) – Build and run reliable browser automations as code

#12

Post by fkilaiwi »

asdev wrote: post #10

Is this a bet that Computer Use models don't get better and cheaper?

If you think about "price", "speed" and "accuracy (reliability/quality)", our bet is that models won't hit those 3 together. So you won't get a model that is very fast, very cheap and very accurate anytime soon.

Also, imagine that you have a case where you want to scrape 10,000 records from a website, why have AI navigate to every page to do this? why not write the code, run it, and get consistent and fast result? its also predictable, if it messes up, you know what happened and you can trace it to the exact line of code.

Re: Launch HN: Intuned (YC S22) – Build and run reliable browser automations as code

#16

Post by fkilaiwi »

TZubiri wrote: post #15

What's the benefit of using playwright instead of an official webdriver directly?

We actually do support CDP directly as well. As for why playwright, playwright provides a lot of benefits that we like in terms of being code - like auto-waiting, good syntax for a lot of operations, agents can use playwright pretty well and playwright is generally like by the community we target.

If a customer, doesn't want to use playwright, they don't have to given CDP but we most of our templates use playwright.

Re: Launch HN: Intuned (YC S22) – Build and run reliable browser automations as code

#18

Post by fkilaiwi »

trollbridge wrote: post #17

Biggest question I have is how this will overcome sites that implement aggressive anti-automation security. I can easily automate websites with existing tools until I slam into that wall.

Great question - we tried so many things and overtime, we ended up doing 2 things - custom chromium build and extension to solve captchas. In our docs, checkout stealth mode - https://intunedhq.com/docs/main/02-features/stealth-mode-cap...

Also, one of our engineers did a write up on bot detection systems and how they work - https://intunedhq.com/blog/how-bot-detection-works

Re: Launch HN: Intuned (YC S22) – Build and run reliable browser automations as code

#19

Post by nullbio »

fkilaiwi wrote: post #12
asdev wrote: post #10

Is this a bet that Computer Use models don't get better and cheaper?

If you think about "price", "speed" and "accuracy (reliability/quality)", our bet is that models won't hit those 3 together. So you won't get a model that is very fast, very cheap and very accurate anytime soon. Also, imagine that you have a case where you want to scrape 10,000 records from a website, why have AI navigate to every page to do this? why not write the code, run it, and get consistent and fast result? it…

What is the advantage of your product over having Codex generate a script using something like https://github.com/D4Vinci/Scrapling?

Re: Launch HN: Intuned (YC S22) – Build and run reliable browser automations as code

#20

Post by fkilaiwi »

nullbio wrote: post #19
fkilaiwi wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you think about "price", "speed" and "accuracy (reliability/quality)", our bet is that models won't hit those 3 together. So you won't get a model that is very fast, very cheap and very accurate anytime soon. Also, imagine that you have a case where you want to scrape 10,000 records from a website, why have AI navigate to every page to do this? why not write the code, run it, and get consistent and fast result? it…

What is the advantage of your product over having Codex generate a script using something like https://github.com/D4Vinci/Scrapling ?

our product is infra + agent. You can use codex or other agent to generate the code. We actually have a cli that allows you to deploy projects to our infrastructure.

We are actually working on open sourcing a plugin that you can use with any coding harness!

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