Hey HN! We’re Chris, Jorrie, and Evan of BrowserBook, an IDE for writing and debugging Playwright-based web automations. You can download it as a Mac app here: https://browserbook.com , and there’s a demo video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ODGJBCNqGUI
Why we built this: When we were going through YC, we were a company that automated back-office healthcare workflows. Since the interoperability ecosystem in healthcare is so fragmented, we started using browser agents to automate EMRs, practice management software, and payment portals directly through the web. When we did, we ran into a ton of problems:
Speed: High latency on LLM calls vs. a scripting approach
Cost: We burned through tokens with all the context we needed to make the automations reasonably accurate
Reliability: Even with detailed instructions, context, and tools, agents tended to drift on multi-step tasks in unpredictable ways
Debuggability: When drift did occur, we were essentially playing whack-a-mole in our prompt and re-running the whole automation to debug issues (see above: speed and cost issues made this quite painful)
More and more we were just giving our agent scripts to execute. Eventually, we came to the conclusion that scripting is a better approach for web automation for these sort of use cases. But scripting was also too painful, so we set out to solve those problems with BrowserBook.
Under the hood, it runs a standalone TypeScript REPL wired directly into an inline browser instance, with built-in tooling to make script development quick and easy. This includes:
- A fully interactive browser window directly in the IDE so you can run your code without context switching
- A Jupyter-notebook-style environment - the idea here is you can write portions of your automation in individual cells and run them individually (and quickly reset manually in the browser), instead of having to rerun the whole thing every time
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