antves

7 ms·

1.
by antves 2mo ago
It is surprisingly not obvious, neural nets are weird just like brains https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-026-10319-8
2.
by antves 4mo ago
I think one main point is that not all "computer use" is the same, the harness and agentic experience matters a lot. A poorly designed API experience can actually be _less_ efficient than a well designed browser or computer use ex
3.
by antves 7mo ago
totally agree on the interface. I agree that there is communication overhead between the agents, although so far it looks like they can communicate very effectively and efficiently. We’re also working on efficient ways to transfer more cont
4.
by antves 7mo ago
I think our main differentiator is that we have been building browser agents for over a year and our technology is today 5x faster and 7x cheaper than browser-use, while also being significantly more reliable
5.
by antves 7mo ago
definitely only your own traffic! will add to the docs for ease of mind
6.
by antves 7mo ago
we benchmarked on webvoyager and have a few more benchmarks coming up (see https://docs.smooth.sh/performance ), we’ll be publishing the full results shortly we run headful browsers with a fingerprinting that is as stealth a
7.
by antves 7mo ago
it's interesting to see how things will play out, but I really believe that doing Claude Code (maybe with Opus 4.6) + click tool + move_mouse tool + snapshot page tool + another 114 more tools is definitely not the best approach the ma
8.
by antves 7mo ago
ah fair point! the tunnel is peer-to-peer so it doesn't add too much overhead, but you can't really beat localhost on latency I'd be curious to try and see if practically the difference is so little that it doesn't matte
9.
by antves 7mo ago
the Claude --chrome command has a few limitations: 1. it exposes low-level tools which make your agent interact directly with the browser which is extremely slow, VERY expensive, and less effective as the agent ends up dealing with UI mecha
10.
by antves 7mo ago
thanks! it can actually test apps running on your localhost with our tunneling feature ( https://docs.smooth.sh/features/use-my-ip ) you should be able to tell it to go to your localhost address and it should be able to
11.
by antves 7mo ago
indeed! there is no reason why tooling for AI agents shouldn't use AI when tooling for humans is shifting towards AI
12.
by antves 7mo ago
yes that's right! I think this might be the way AI agents adoption plays out more broadly Agents that start using subagents rather than humans using the subagents directly
13.
by antves 7mo ago
typo: what to do as opposed to how to do it
14.
by antves 7mo ago
Thanks for asking! We developed our browser agent that uses a mix of custom and frontier models for different parts of the system
15.
by antves 7mo ago
Our website does not dive as deep as the docs on the Smooth CLI yet
16.
by antves 7mo ago
would love to hear what pricing model would work best for you our current model is a subscription plan that determines the number of browsers available + credits top-ups for increased usage
17.
by antves 7mo ago
I agree it would be really cool to run this locally, it's definitely something on our radars
18.
by antves 7mo ago
I believe this shift will actually happen organically over time there will be demand for AI-first online services as people continue to delegate more and more tasks to agents and this will drive implementation
19.
by antves 7mo ago
have you tried any other AI browser automation tools? we would be curious to hear about your use cases because the use cases we have been working on with our customers involve scenarios where traditional playwright automations are not viabl
20.
by antves 7mo ago
That's a great point, we'll publish everything on our docs as soon as possible
21.
by antves 7mo ago
There are pros and cons to running the browser on your own machine For example, with remote browsers you get to give your swarm of agents unlimited and always-on browsers that they can use concurrently without being bottlenecked by your dev
22.
by antves 7mo ago
Definitely! Making Smooth as cost-effective as possible it's been a core goal for us, so we'd really love to hear your thoughts on this We'll continue to make Smooth more affordable and accessible as this is a core principle
23.
by antves 7mo ago
We love these tools but they were designed for testing, not for automation. They are too low-level to be used as they are by AI. For example, the playwright MCP is very unreliable and inefficient to use. To mention a few issues, it does not
24.
by antves 7mo ago
Our approach is actually very cost-effective compared to alternatives. Our browser uses a token-efficient LLM-friendly representation of the webpage that keeps context size low, while also allowing small and efficient models to handle the l
25.
by antves 7mo ago
It's amazing how agents like Claude Code become very much more autonomous when they have the ability to verify their work. That's part of the reason why they work much better for unit-testable work. I think this paradigm was very
26.
by antves 7mo ago
Thanks for bringing this point up! We take security very seriously and one of the main advantages of using Smooth over running things on your personal device is that your agent gets a browser in a sandboxed machine with no credentials or pe
27.
by antves 7mo ago
Totally agree! The web for agents is evolving very fast and it's still unclear what it will look like Our take is that, while that happens, agents today need to be able to access all the web resources that we can access as humans Also,
28.
by antves 7mo ago
Thanks for asking! There are a few core differences: 1. we expose a higher level interface which allows the agent to think about what to do as opposed to what to do 2. we developed a token-efficient representation of the webpages that combi
29.
Show HN: Smooth CLI – Token-efficient browser for AI agents(docs.smooth.sh)
109 points by antves 7mo ago|74 comments
30.
by antves 1y ago
Not at the moment. Happy to run a task on your behalf if you'd like!

More ›