Show HN: Libretto – Making AI browser automations deterministic
Libretto ( https://libretto.sh ) is a Skill+CLI that makes it easy for your coding agent to generate deterministic browser automations and debug existing ones. Key shift is going from “give an agent a prompt at runtime and hope it figures things out” to: “Use coding agents to generate real scripts you can inspect, run, and debug”. Here’s a demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0cDpIntmHAM . Docs start at https://libretto.sh/docs/get-started/introduction . We spent a year building and maintaining browser automations for EHR and payer portal integrations at our healthcare startup. Building these automations and debugging failed ones was incredibly time-consuming. There’s lots of tools that use runtime AI like Browseruse and Stagehand which we tried, but (1) they’re reliant on custom DOM parsing that's unreliable on older and complicated websites (including all of healthcare). Using a website’s internal network calls is faster and more reliable when possible. (2) They can be expensive since they rely on lots of AI calls and for workflows with complicated logic you can’t always rely on caching actions to make sure it will work. (3) They’re at runtime so it’s not interpretable what the agent is going to do. You kind of hope you prompted it correctly to do the right thing, but legacy workflows are often unintuitive and inconsistent across sites so you can’t trust an agent to just figure it out at runtime. (4) They don’t really help you generate new automations or help you debug automation failures. We wanted a way to reliably generate and maintain browser automations in messy, high-stakes environments, without relying on fragile runtime agents. Libretto is different because instead of runtime agents it uses “development-time AI”: scripts are generated ahead of time as actual code you can read and control, not opaque agent behavior at runtime. Instead of a black box, you own the code and can inspect, modify, version, and debug everything. Rather than relying on runtime DOM parsing, Libretto takes a hybrid approach combining Playwright UI automation with direct network/API requests within the browser session for better reliability and bot detection evasion. It records manual user actions to help agents generate and update scripts, supports step-through debugging, has an optional read-only mode to prevent agents from accidentally submitting or modifying data, and generates code that follows all the abstractions and conventions you have already in your coding repo. Would love to hear how others are building and maintaining browser automations in practice, and any feedback on the approach we’ve taken here.
Discussion Highlights (12 comments)
devstatic
this is interesting
messh
how does it differ from playwright-cli?
seagull
I've wanted something like this for ages, excited to try this out!
gbibas
Cool. Thank you for sharing. While AI tools are extremely powerful, packages like this help create some good standards and stepping stones for connectivity that the models haven’t gotten around to yet. Thanks again.
arpadav
this looks awesome
etwigg
Thanks for this! We have clear answers for things that are 100% and 0% automated, but it’s always that 80%-99% automated slice where the frontier is, great idea.
daveguy
What is the license? Edit: nevermind. I see from the website it is MIT. Probably should add a COPYING.md or LICENSE.md to the repository itself.
z3ugma
Love it! Do you have a BAA with Claude though? Otherwise, your demo is likely exposing PHI to 3rd parties and exposing you to risk related to HIPAA
heyitsaamir
I built something very similar for my company internally. The idea was that that the maintenance of the code is on the agent and the code is purely an optimization. If it breaks the agent runs it iteratively, fixes the code for next time. Happy to replace my tool with this and see how it does!
anthuswilliams
I literally _just_ put up an announcement on our internal Slack of a tool I had spent a few weeks trying to get right. Strange to post the announcement and, literally the same day, see a better, publicly available toolkit to do enable that very workflow! I'm also using Playwright, to automate a platform that has a maze of iframes, referer links, etc. Hopefully I can replace the internals with a script I get from this project.
boriskurikhin
I like the pre-gen approach! Curious how it responds to JS that changes how components are rendered at run-time.
yehia2amer
how does it differ from https://github.com/browserbase/stagehand ?