Ask HN: Any local agents to help repetitive browser tasks?

Been spending a lot of time just buying and printing labels through an e-commerce platform and it got me wondering: is there anything to run on a local PC that could automate this?

6 points | by pcdoodle 3 hours ago

5 comments

  • bofadeez 5 minutes ago
  • miguelspizza 1 hour ago
    Hey I wrote MCP-B and am about to do another launch here in a week or so. The product is a browser agent which does browser automation sudo-deterministically over WebMCP.

    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44515403

    I’d love to give your beta access and get your thoughts if you are up to give it a run on the task you want automated.

    Shoot me an email if you are interested

    alex(at)mcp-b.ai

  • leakycap 1 hour ago
    > spending a lot of time just buying and printing labels through an e-commerce platform

    Why can't you just connect the platforms?

    If there is no default way to do this, try Zapier. IFTTT is a very low cost option if Zapier doesn't support your vendors. Between those two you can connect almost anything.

  • satvikpendem 2 hours ago
    You might be able to use AutoHotKey rather than looking for an AI agent.

    https://www.autohotkey.com/

    https://github.com/raeleus/AHK-Macro-Recorder

    • pcdoodle 2 hours ago
      Good recommendation. I see there’s others using this as well for this type of task, but it’s not fully automated. They got it to the point where it detects PDFs of shipping labels and automatically prints, but not the purchasing part.
  • nicbou 2 hours ago
    Playwright is a great tool for this. There is a helper for writing automations. It's commonly used for automated testing but it's good for controlling a browser with Python scripts in general.
    • darkvertex 41 minutes ago
      Playwright is great. Take a look at Stagehand, it's an AI layer built on top of Playwright: https://www.stagehand.dev (It can run locally.)
    • busymom0 12 minutes ago
      If one owns a Mac and knows swift or objective c, they can just use WKWebView with user scripts too.