Do you understand what Browserbase just open-sourced???
an agent that learns any website once, then does the job 10x cheaper forever
[ literally how it helps me ]:
- writing scrapers for new sites (used to spend half a day per site, every single time)
- chasing selectors when sites redesign on a tuesday (lost weeks to this)
- digging out hidden APIs buried in network traffic (gave up on this too many times)
- explaining to my team HOW the agent does the job (was impossible until now)
Autobrowse figured all of that out by itself in 3-5 iterations
and saved the answer as a markdown file the next agent reads BEFORE it starts
[ how it actually works ]:
> give the agent a real task on a real site
> it tries, fails, learns, tries again
> 3-5 rounds and it converges on a path that just works
> writes that path down as SKILL.md
> next agent loads it and skips straight to the answer
the markdown file IS the memory
every browser agent before this had AMNESIA
figured out the site, then forgot the second the session closed
you've been paying the same discovery tax 100 times in a row.. and not noticing
[ Karpathy's auto-research idea, but applied to the web ]:
same idea, just different approach
Karpathy did it for research and coding loops
Autobrowse does it for the open web
the new part:
Karpathy's loop got smarter inside ONE session
Autobrowse SAVES the lesson into a file the next agent reads before it even starts
iteration = graduation
the agent doesn't just learn.. it leaves a note for every agent that comes after
[ the math ]:
Craigslist scrape:
- generic agent loop: $0.22 / 71 seconds
- graduated Autobrowse skill: $0.12 / 27 seconds
form-fill task:
- run 1: $1.40
- run 4: $0.24
run 1 pays for everything that comes after
[ the part that broke my brain ]:
they pointed it at a federal grants portal
agent dug around and found an undocumented JSON endpoint humans had missed for years
a 28-page scrape collapsed into one fetch
> an agent tried something a person never would
> and found something a person would never see..
100% OPEN SOURCE, FREE
I was digging inside of it for the whole morning and got impressed when I saw such as savings on tokens spending
literally for scraping 10 websites, I spent just 12 cents instead of basic $1.02
P.S. Sorry if somewhere my reaction was too "forcing" to setup it, just wanted to mark by BOLD what's the treasure
you can skip this, it's your deal โค๏ธ
@ianlapham Iโve set mine up with obsidian. Fun to watch my knowledge graph evolve daily. Even more fun to have real outcomes: workshops, in person connections, and creative outputs like videos and music.