frontpage.
newsnewestaskshowjobs

Made with ♥ by @iamnishanth

Open Source @Github

Open in hackernews

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

https://github.com/browser-use/workflow-use
61•gregpr07•14h 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•14h ago
Cool stuff!
cdolan•13h 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•12h 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•12h 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•12h 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•11h 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•11h 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•10h ago
seems similar to selenium plugin for firefox, minus the scripting it generates.
vasusen•10h 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•8h ago
Can utilizing Chrome Extensions be added? It seems no one has and would be a critical bridge to many browser tasks
nico•8h 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

casslin•1h ago
we built a chrome extension supporting browser use and can run locally in ur browser: https://github.com/nanobrowser/nanobrowser, feel free to implement workflow use on top of our code base in typescript. Love to learn how it works!
casslin•1h ago
we built a chrome extension supporting browser use: https://github.com/nanobrowser/nanobrowser, feel free to implement workflow use on top of our code base in typescript. Love to learn how it works!
Stiopa•4h 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•4h ago
We use selenium for RPAs. Saving this as an alternative to explore.
casslin•1h ago
If any one wanna try it in browser can try implement it on our chrome extension code base in typescript: https://github.com/nanobrowser/nanobrowser, we support browser use and re wrote its code in typescript, not yet supporting workflow use and love to hear how it works from community!

Show HN: Fahmatrix – A Lightweight, Pandas-Like DataFrame Library for Java

https://github.com/moustafa-nasr/fahmatrix
15•mousomashakel•1h ago•3 comments

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

https://github.com/dipampaul17/KVSplit
228•dipampaul17•10h ago•35 comments

Show HN: Merliot – plugging physical devices into LLMs

https://github.com/merliot/hub
33•sfeldma•5h ago•7 comments

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

https://github.com/gorenje/erlang-red
212•Towaway69•15h ago•92 comments

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

https://github.com/vcms-io/solidis
44•jayl-e-e•9h ago•4 comments

Show HN: SQL-tString a t-string SQL builder in Python

https://github.com/pgjones/sql-tstring
75•pgjones•17h ago•30 comments

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

https://github.com/browser-use/workflow-use
61•gregpr07•14h ago•16 comments

Show HN: Rv, a Package Manager for R

https://github.com/A2-ai/rv
68•Keats•14h ago•29 comments

Show HN: Self-Funded Game with Homemade Engine – Play Online, Steam Coming

https://bereprobate.com
13•delduca•8h ago•7 comments

Show HN: Real-Time Gaussian Splatting

https://github.com/axbycc/LiveSplat
139•markisus•1d ago•51 comments

Show HN: Muscle-Mem, a behavior cache for AI agents

https://github.com/pig-dot-dev/muscle-mem
215•edunteman•2d ago•51 comments

Show HN: Easel – Code multiplayer games like singleplayer

https://easel.games/about
85•BSTRhino•2d ago•43 comments

Show HN: Undetectag, track stolen items with AirTag

https://undetectag.com/
109•pompidoo•1d ago•97 comments

Show HN: I’ve built an IoT device to let my family know when I’m in a meeting

https://nullonerror.org/2025/05/11/i-have-built-an-iot-device-to-let-my-family-know-when-i-am-in-a-meeting/
118•delduca•5d ago•77 comments

Show HN: A free AI risk assessment tool for LLM applications

https://www.gettavo.com/app
36•percyding99•1d ago•12 comments

Show HN: Min.js style compression of tech docs for LLM context

https://github.com/marv1nnnnn/llm-min.txt
175•marv1nnnnn•1d ago•52 comments

Show HN: HelixDB – Open-source vector-graph database for AI applications (Rust)

https://github.com/HelixDB/helix-db/
232•GeorgeCurtis•3d ago•107 comments

Show HN: Making #regions actually useful in VSCode

https://github.com/alythobani/vscode-region-helper
11•alyt•16h ago•3 comments

Show HN: I vibe coded an open-source Go app to back up DBs using Docker labels

https://github.com/resulgg/label-backup
5•standardresul•16h ago•2 comments

Show HN: Airweave – Let agents search any app

https://github.com/airweave-ai/airweave
174•lennertjansen•4d ago•39 comments

Show HN: Lumier – Run macOS VMs in a Docker

https://github.com/trycua/cua/tree/main/libs/lumier
154•GreenGames•2d ago•52 comments

Show HN: Samurai Interview – a mock interview simulator

https://www.samuraiinterview.com/
5•fairAndBased•13h ago•2 comments

Show HN: Semantic Calculator (king-man+woman=?)

https://calc.datova.ai
173•nxa•2d ago•172 comments

Show HN: wghttp – An HTTP server for managing WireGuard devices

https://github.com/brsyuksel/wghttp
4•brsyuksel•14h ago•1 comments

Show HN: CSV GB+ by Data.olllo – Open and Process CSVs Locally

https://apps.microsoft.com/detail/9pfcrwp46v22?hl=en-US&gl=US
51•olllo•2d ago•22 comments

Show HN: Heygem AI – An Open Source, Free Alternative to Heygen AI

https://github.com/duixcom/Duix.Heygem/blob/main/README.md
24•heygem-ai-new•1d ago•3 comments

Show HN: Inconveniently operating my computer with voice and hand gestures

https://twitter.com/measure_plan/status/1923452731248795856
5•getToTheChopin•11h ago•0 comments

Show HN: I made a platform to debug Puppeteer (JS) crashes visually

https://buglesstack.com/
17•ivanalemunioz•3d ago•2 comments

Show HN: Convert JSON Schema to SQL DDL

https://github.com/VasilVelikov00/json-schema-to-sql
10•vjv•1d ago•0 comments

Show HN: Kudos.wiki – Discover the best movies on Wikipedia

https://kudos.wiki
17•kilgarenone•1d ago•6 comments