Show HN: Tine – Drive Wayland Around with Agents

So recently Anthropic came out with tools that let you drive Windows and Mac OS around. But I don't use Windows or MacOS, and was curious about some Wayland internals stuff and whether it would be possible to build something usable on a relatively restrictive platform like Wayland. So I made Tine.

Tine is a GNOME extension and CLI that lets an agent (I have used Claude but in theory any agent that can access the CLI) drive the desktop around using SPI trees (AT-SPI2), OCR, and visual fallbacks. Agent can do work with the a11y (AT-SPI2) trees, take screenshots, zoom in on a grid, click, enter text using a uinput device, and generally bumble their way around a Wayland Linux desktop.

This project would probably have been way easier in x11 but Wayland is teh future!!!111 Thanks for any thoughts and feedback and feels good to release something here after a decade of lurking. Decade plus but who's counting / I'm not old.

Show HN: Tine – Drive Wayland Around with Agents
github.com

Yes. It works really well with Firefox. Chrome is basically a big blank, could expose the Chrome a11y tree but would have to turn on developer / debug mode or whatever which has downsides. It's really nice for Firefox and GTK apps and it does OCR + grid stuff for everything else.

Yeah. Some of the tree is a mess, could try to ocr those bits. It's on the roadmap. :)

I will say I have some feelings about Wayland and how hard it makes some stuff I do. I'm visually impaired and have a whole stack of tools. But this project has helped me port over 70-80% of those tools and it helps me bridge some gaps on Wayland temporarily so I can get infra set up. It's also great for the many sites that Claude blocks for whatever reason (Reddit, I am a sub mod but the a11y on Reddit is terrible, AmEx, LinkedIn).