Show HN: Smooth CLI – Token-efficient browser for AI agents (opens in new tab)

Curious: what are people using as the best open source and locally hosted versions to have agents browse the web?

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 permissions by default. This means that the agent will be able to see only what you allow it to see. We also have some degree of guard-railing which we will continue to mature over time. For example, you can control which URLs the agent is allowed to view and which are off limits.

Until we'll be able to run everything locally on device, there must be a level of trust in the organizations that control the technology stack, passing from the LLM all the way to the infrastructure providers. And this applies to every personal information you disclose at any touch point to any AI company.

I believe that this trust is something that we and every other company in the space will need to fundamentally continue to grow and mature with our community and our users.

Glad I saw this comment.

The product sounds interesting but I am not gonna run this is in the cloud for my use cases.

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 device resources

I think we tend to default to thinking in terms of one agent and one browser scenarios because we anthropomorphize them a lot, but really there is no ceiling to how parallel these workflows can become once you unlock autonomous behavior

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 contextual information

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

I built a browser agent that can almost certainly handle that task. Will test and let you know by posting here later.

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 as possible and on top of that we can use your ip

anecdotally, making all requests originate from your own residential address has been a major success compared to other cloud-only solutions

it will be interesting to see how this will play out, having to “hide the agent” feels like a temporary work around until society accepts that agents actually do exist

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

Hello, do you mind open sourcing it ? my email hn@medreda.blog

definitely only your own traffic! will add to the docs for ease of mind

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 low-level navigation. This means agents like Claude can work at a higher abstraction level rather than burning tokens on every click and scroll, which would be far more expensive

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 navigate to your local app from the remote browser

let us know if you have any questions!

What is wrong with "claude --chrome"?

Thanks for asking! We developed our browser agent that uses a mix of custom and frontier models for different parts of the system

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

The new SaaS is subagent as a service?

Ahah, indeed that's true... That's why we've just released Smooth CLI (https://docs.smooth.sh/cli/overview) and the SKILL.md (smooth-sdk/skills/smooth-browser/SKILL.md) associated with it. That should contain everything your agent needs to know to use Smooth. We will definitely add a LLM-friendly reference to it in the landing page and the docs introduction.

Our website does not dive as deep as the docs on the Smooth CLI yet

Vercel also released a similar tool with a unique interface/dsl - https://github.com/vercel-labs/agent-browser

> agent-browser click "#submit" > agent-browser fill "#email" "test@example.com" > agent-browser find role button click --name "Submit"

I appreciate that there’s innovation in the space, we will get closer to the interface that’s most appropriate for models to tool-call. I’m going to check your link out, sounds interesting.

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 visible in yesterday's blog post from Anthropic (https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/building-c-compiler) when they mentioned that giving the agents the ability to verify against GCC was the key to unlock further progress

Giving a browser to these agents is a no brainer, especially if one works in QA or develops web-based services

frontend QA is exactly where i've seen the biggest ROI with browser agents. the gap with Playwright MCP specifically is that it assumes the agent can reason about CSS selectors and DOM state, which breaks constantly on anything with dynamic rendering, client-side routing, or shadow DOM.

the right abstraction for QA is probably closer to what a manual tester actually does, describe expected behavior, let a specialized system figure out the mechanical verification steps.

but the harder unsolved problem is evaluation: how do you reliably distinguish "the agent verified the behavior" from "the agent navigated to the right page and hallucinated a success report"? visual diffing against golden screenshots helps for regression but doesn't cover semantic correctness of dynamic content.

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 combines both visual and textual elements, heavily optimized for what LLMs are good at. 3. because we control the agentic loop, it also means that we can do fancy things on contextual injections, compressions, asynchronous manipulations, etc which are impossible to achieve when exposing the navigation interface 4. we use a coding agent under the hood, meaning that it can express complex actions efficiently and effectively compared to the CLI interface that agent-browser exposes 5. because we control the agent, we can use small and efficient LLMs which make the system much faster, cheaper, and more reliable

Also, our service comes with batteries included: the agent can use browsers in our cloud with auto-captcha solvers, stealth mode, we can proxy your own ip, etc

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, browsers are a really special piece of software because they provide access to almost every other kind of software. This makes them arguably the single most important tool for AI agents, and that’s why we believe that a browser might be all agents need to suddenly become ten times more useful than they already are

seems unlikely, you're asking the entire internet to update their software for dubious improvements