Not fully equivalent to what is doing Skyvern, but still an interesting approach.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1o8m0ti/we_buil...
Thanks for sharing!
That being said...
LLMS are amazing for some coding tasks and fail miserably at others. My hypothesis is that there is some sort of practical limit to how many concepts an LLM can hold into account no matter the context window given the current model architectures.
For a long time I wanted to find some sort of litmus test to measure this and I think I found one that is an easy to understand programming problem, can be done in a single file, yet complex enough. I have not found a single LLM to be able to build a solution without careful guidance.
I wrote more about this here if you are interested: https://chatbotkit.com/reflections/where-ai-coding-agents-go...
Plan for solving this problem:
- Build a comprehensive design system with AI models
- Catalogue the components it fails on (like yours)
- These components are the perfect test cases for hiring challenges (immune to “cheating” with AI)
- The answers to these hiring challenges can be used as training data for models
- Newer models can now solve these problems
- You can vary this by framework (web component / React / Vue / Svelte / etc.) or by version (React v18 vs React v19, etc.)
What you’re doing with this is finding the exact contours of the edge of AI capability, then building a focused training dataset to push past those boundaries. Also a Rosetta Stone for translating between different frameworks.
I put a brain dump about the bigger picture this fits into here:
https://jim.dabell.name/articles/2025/08/08/autonomous-softw...
One can see the results in a place where most code is terrible (data science is the place I see this most, as it's what I do mostly) but most people don't realise this. I assume this also happens for stuff like frontend, where I don't see the badness because I'm not an expert.
my own solution? 1.56 seconds. I consider myself to be at an intermediate skill level, and while LLMs are useful, they likely wont replace any but the least talented programmers. Even then i'd value human with critial thinking paired with an LLM over an even more competent LLM.
Just for curiosities sake, what language have you been trying to use?
And then the third or fourth time its automatic. Its weird but sometimes I feel like the best way to make agents work is to metathink about how I myself work.
You don’t get that whole uncanny valley disconnect do you?
What? LLMs don't think nor learn in the sense humans do. They have absolutely no resemblance to a human being. This must be the most ridiculous statement I've read this year
What used to be a constant almost daily chore with them breaking all the time at random intervals is now a self-healing system that rarely ever fails.
I know the authors of Skyvern are around here sometimes -- How do you think about code generation with vision based approaches to agentic browser use like OpenAI's Operator, Claude Computer Use and Magnitude?
From my POV, I think the vision based approaches are superior, but they are less amenable to codegen IMO.
We can ask the vision based models to output why they are doing what they are doing, and fallback to code-based approaches for subsequent runs
If a website isn't using Cloudflare or a JS-only design, it's generally better to skip playwright. All the major AIs understand beautifulsoup pretty well, and they're likely to write you a faster, less brittle scraper.
At scale, dropping the heavier dependencies and network traffic of a browser is meaningful.
They aren't enough for anything that's login-protected, or requires interacting with wizards (eg JS, downloading files, etc)
That said I’d try it again but I don’t want to spend money again.
AI, build me a scraper
what do you want to scrape
[lists sites to scrape]
oh, I've already scraped those relentlessly, here ya go
Is AI capable of saying, "This website sucks, and doesn't work - file a complaint with the webmaster?"
I once had similar problems with the CIA's World Factbook. I shudder to think what an I would do there.
Skyvern kept suggesting improvements unrelated to the issue they were testing for
The AI isn’t mad, and won’t refuse to renew. Unless it’s being run by the client of course.
Are clients using your platform to assess vendors?
While I cans see _some_ good uses for it, there are clearly abusive uses for it, including in their examples.
I mean jesus fuck, who wants cheap/free automation out there to "Skyvern can be instructed to navigate to job application websites like Lever.co and automatically generate answers, fill out and submit the job application."?
I already have to deal with enough totally unsuitable scattergun job applications every time we advertise an open position.
This is just asking to be used for abuse.