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Getting AI to write good SQL

https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/databases/techniques-for-improving-text-to-sql
210•richards•6h ago•108 comments

Wow@Home – Network of Amateur Radio Telescopes

https://phl.upr.edu/wow/outreach
26•visviva•2h ago•0 comments

Thoughts on thinking

https://dcurt.is/thinking
324•bradgessler•9h ago•220 comments

Show HN: KVSplit – Run 2-3x longer contexts on Apple Silicon

https://github.com/dipampaul17/KVSplit
206•dipampaul17•8h ago•31 comments

Postman for MCP

https://usetexture.com/##
15•andes314•1h ago•2 comments

XTool – Cross-platform Xcode replacement

https://github.com/xtool-org/xtool
26•TheWiggles•1h ago•11 comments

A Research Preview of Codex

https://openai.com/index/introducing-codex/
387•meetpateltech•13h ago•309 comments

Rustls Server-Side Performance

https://www.memorysafety.org/blog/rustls-server-perf/
70•jaas•3d ago•10 comments

MIT asks arXiv to withdraw preprint of paper on AI and scientific discovery

https://economics.mit.edu/news/assuring-accurate-research-record
261•carabiner•13h ago•142 comments

Coding agent in 94 lines of Ruby

https://radanskoric.com/articles/coding-agent-in-ruby
68•radanskoric•2d ago•21 comments

ClojureScript 1.12.42

https://clojurescript.org/news/2025-05-16-release
109•Borkdude•7h ago•20 comments

WebGL Gray-Scott Explorer (2012)

http://www.mrob.com/pub/comp/xmorphia/ogl/index.html
16•joebig•3h ago•1 comments

I'm Peter Roberts, immigration attorney, who does work for YC and startups. AMA

190•proberts•13h ago•354 comments

Show HN: Visual flow-based programming for Erlang, inspired by Node-RED

https://github.com/gorenje/erlang-red
205•Towaway69•13h ago•89 comments

X X^t can be faster

https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.09814
165•robinhouston•12h ago•47 comments

MCP: An in-depth introduction

https://www.speakeasy.com/mcp/mcp-tutorial
33•ritzaco•3d ago•9 comments

A Linux kernel developer plays with Home Assistant: general impressions

https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/1017720/7155ecb9602e9ef2/
3•pabs3•1h ago•0 comments

Show HN: Merliot – plugging physical devices into LLMs

https://github.com/merliot/hub
19•sfeldma•3h ago•6 comments

They Were Identical 'Twinnies' Who Charmed Orwell, Camus and More

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/04/books/review/the-dazzling-paget-sisters-ariane-bankes.html
20•lermontov•4h ago•4 comments

Will AI systems perform poorly due to AI-generated material in training data?

https://cacm.acm.org/news/the-collapse-of-gpt/
65•pseudolus•4h ago•67 comments

New high-quality hash measures 71GB/s on M4

https://github.com/Nicoshev/rapidhash
15•nicoshev11•2d ago•4 comments

Show HN: Roast My Dish – AI roasts your food photos with brutal honesty

https://www.roastmydish.online/
12•romeumaleiane•2h ago•6 comments

Behind Silicon Valley and the GOP’s campaign to ban state AI laws

https://www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/de-democratizing-ai
14•spenvo•1h ago•1 comments

Show HN: Solidis – Tiny TS Redis client, no deps, for serverless

https://github.com/vcms-io/solidis
37•jayl-e-e•6h ago•2 comments

Java at 30: Interview with James Gosling

https://thenewstack.io/java-at-30-the-genius-behind-the-code-that-changed-tech/
170•chhum•15h ago•249 comments

The first year of free-threaded Python

https://labs.quansight.org/blog/free-threaded-one-year-recap
249•rbanffy•18h ago•248 comments

Material 3 Expressive

https://design.google/library/expressive-material-design-google-research
329•meetpateltech•3d ago•513 comments

Foundry (YC F24) Is Hiring – Founding Engineer (ML × SWE)

https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/foundry/jobs/uwi8b6I-founding-engineer-ml-x-swe
1•lakabimanil•11h ago

The Magic Hours: The Films and Hidden Life of Terrence Malick

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v47/n09/david-thomson/cool-tricking
53•mitchbob•9h ago•31 comments

Methodical Banality

https://aeon.co/essays/who-needs-ai-text-generation-when-theres-erasmus-of-rotterdam
33•CharlesW•7h ago•11 comments
Open in hackernews

Show HN: Workflow Use – Deterministic, self-healing browser automation (RPA 2.0)

https://github.com/browser-use/workflow-use
58•gregpr07•12h ago
Hey HN – Gregor & Magnus here again.

A few months ago, we launched Browser Use (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43173378), which let LLMs perform tasks in the browser using natural language prompts. It was great for one-off tasks like booking flights or finding products—but we soon realized enterprises have somewhat different needs:

They typically have one workflow with dynamic variables (e.g., filling out a form and downloading a PDF) that they want to reliably run a million times without breaking. Pure LLM agents were slow, expensive, and unpredictable for these high-frequency tasks.

So we just started working on Workflow Use:

- You show the browser what to do (by manually recording steps; show don’t tell).

- An LLM converts these recordings into deterministic scripts with variables (scripts include AI steps as well, where it’s 100% agentic)

- Scripts run reliably, 10x faster, and ~90% cheaper than Browser Use.

- If a step breaks, workflow will fallback to Browser Use and agentically run the step. (This self-healing functionality is still very early.)

This project just kicked off, so lots of things will break, it’s definitely not production-ready yet, and plenty of stuff is still missing (like a solid editor and proper self-healing). But we wanted to share early, get feedback, and figure out what workflows you’d want to automate this way.

Try it out and let us know what you think!

Comments

pzullo•11h ago
Cool stuff!
cdolan•11h ago
This is amazing. We've been using BrowserUser to try and create deterministic playwright scripts for months with mixed results.

So, so, so excited to see this

deepdarkforest•10h ago
Very cool. 1) How do you deal with timings? If a step includes clicking on a link or something that needs loading, then if you just fire off the generated playwright code at at once, some steps might fail because the xpath is not there yet. So to be safe, i'm guessing you would have to wait using the difference in the timestamps in the json. 2. For self healing, we worked on something similar, and we found it's very easy to get off the rails if one step fails because if your assertions of if the fix was correct are off, then the next and next steps will also fail etc. The most stable way was to just regenerate all steps if a step fails in 2 attempts (2 runs of the flow) consecutively. If the xpath is broken for a step, very likely the subsequent ones won't be worth healing individually.
gregpr07•10h ago
1) we made this sick function in browser use library which analyses when there are no more requests going through - so we just reuse that!

2) yeah good question. The end goal is to completely regenerate the flow if it breaks (let browser use explore the “new” website and update the original flow). But let’s see, soo much could be done here!

What did you work on btw?

deepdarkforest•9h ago
1. Oh yes right. I remember trying it out thinking it was going to be brittle because of analytics etc but it filters for those surprisingly well.

2. We are working on https://www.launchskylight.com/ , agentic QA. For the self onboarding version we are using pure CUA without caching. (We wanted to avoid playwright to make it more flexible for canvas+iframe based apps,where we found HTML based approaches like browser-use limited, and to support desktop apps in the future).

We are betaing caching internally for customers, and releasing it for the self-onboarding soon. We use CUA actions for caching instead of playwright. Caching with pixel native models is def a bit more brittle for clicks and we focus on purely vision based analysis to decide to proceed or not. I think for scaling though you are 100% right, screenshots every step for validating are okay/worth it, but running an agent non-deterministically for actions is def an overkill for enterprise, that was what we found as well.

Geminis video understanding is also an interesting way to analyze what went wrong in more interactive apps. Apart from that i think we share quite a bit of the core thinking, would be interested to chat, will DM!

crazymoka•9h ago
So I can use this and it will pull new data from a database I can use to have it fill out a form? And I can trigger it when I need it to run with the updated form information?
petethomas•8h ago
It's not mentioned here but Kapwork contributed the beginnings of this work in a PR a couple weeks ago: https://github.com/browser-use/browser-use/pull/1437. Thank you Gregor & Magnus for the great tech and all you're doing for the community.
rammy1234•8h ago
seems similar to selenium plugin for firefox, minus the scripting it generates.
vasusen•8h ago
Very cool evolution!

Really great to see the fallback to the agentic run when the automation breaks. For our e2e testing browser automation at Donobu, we independently arrived at the same pattern and have been impressed with how well it works. Automatic self-healed PR example here: https://github.com/donobu-inc/playwright-flows/pull/6/files

edit: typo

ProofHouse•6h ago
Can utilizing Chrome Extensions be added? It seems no one has and would be a critical bridge to many browser tasks
nico•6h ago
Yes. Also, would love something that can run directly in my browser with my sessions

There’s a lot of websites that are super hostile to automation and make it really hard to do simple, small, but repetitive stuff with things like playwright, selenium, chromedriver

Stiopa•2h ago
Haha was just thinking last week there should be a tool called “show don’t tell” that infers a routine from recording, great minds think alike :)) Awesome feature guys, looking forward to playing around!
ListeningPie•2h ago
We use selenium for RPAs. Saving this as an alternative to explore.