Comment by verdverm
18 days ago
Playwright, same thing we use when doing non-ai automation
Fun fact, ai can use the same tools you do, we don't have to reinvent everything and slap a "built for ai" label on it
18 days ago
Playwright, same thing we use when doing non-ai automation
Fun fact, ai can use the same tools you do, we don't have to reinvent everything and slap a "built for ai" label on it
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 correctly pierce through the different frames and does not handle the variety of edge cases that exist on the web. This means that it can't click on the button it needs to click on. Also, because it lacks control over the context design, it cannot optimize for contextual operations and your LLM trace gets polluted with incredible amount of useless tokens. This increases cost, task complexity for the LLM, and latency
On top of that, these tools rely on the accessibility tree, which is just not a viable approach for a huge number of websites
again (see other comment), you are not listening to users and asking questions, you are telling them they are wrong
You describe problems I don't have. I'm happy with Playwright and other scraping tools. Certainly not frustrated enough to pay to send my data to a 3rd party
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 viable, e.g. they operate on net new websites and net new tasks for each execution
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