Show HN: Magnitude – Open-source AI browser automation framework
We got some great feedback from the community, with the most positive response being about our vision-first approach used in our browser agent. However, many wanted to use the underlying agent outside the testing domain. So today, we're releasing our fully featured AI browser automation framework.
You can use it to automate tasks on the web, integrate between apps without APIs, extract data, test your web apps, or as a building block for your own browser agents.
Traditionally, browser automation could only be done via the DOM, even though that’s not how humans use browsers. Most browser agents are still stuck in this paradigm. With a vision-first approach, we avoid relying on flaky DOM navigation and perform better on complex interactions found in a broad variety of sites, for example:
- Drag and drop interactions
- Data visualizations, charts, and tables
- Legacy apps with nested iframes
- Canvas and webGL-heavy sites (like design tools or photo editing)
- Remote desktops streamed into the browser
To interact accurately with the browser, we use visually grounded models to execute precise actions based on pixel coordinates. The model used by Magnitude must be smart enough to plan out actions but also able to execute them. Not many models are both smart *and* visually grounded. We highly recommend Claude Sonnet 4 for the best performance, but if you prefer open source, we also support Qwen-2.5-VL 72B.
Most browser agents never make it to production. This is because of (1) the flaky DOM navigation mentioned above, but (2) the lack of control most browser agents offer. The dominant paradigm is you give the agent a high-level task + tools and hope for the best. This quickly falls apart for production automations that need to be reliable and specific. With Magnitude, you have fine-grained control over the agent with our `act()` and `extract()` syntax, and can mix it with your own code as needed. You also have full control of the prompts at both the action and agent level.
```ts
// Magnitude can handle high-level tasks
await agent.act('Create an issue', {
// Optionally pass data that the agent will use where appropriate
data: {
title: 'Use Magnitude',
description: 'Run "npx create-magnitude-app" and follow the instructions',
},
// It can also handle low-level actions
await agent.act('Drag "Use Magnitude" to the top of the in progress column');
// Intelligently extract data based on the DOM content matching a provided zod schema
const tasks = await agent.extract(
'List in progress issues',
z.array(z.object({
title: z.string(),
description: z.string(),
// Agent can extract existing data or new insights
difficulty: z.number().describe('Rate the difficulty between 1-5')
})),
```
We have a setup script that makes it trivial to get started with an example, just run "npx create-magnitude-app". We’d love to hear what you think!
One thing I'm wondering is if there's anyone doing this at scale? The issue I see is that with complex workflows which take several dozen steps and have complex control flow, the probability of reaching the end falls off pretty hard, because if each step has a .95 chance of completing successfully, after not very many steps you have a pretty small overall probability of success. These use cases are high value because writing a traditional scraper is a huge pain, but we just don't seem to be there yet.
The other side of the coin is simple workflows, but those tend to be the workflows where writing a scraper is pretty trivial. This did work, and I told it to search for a product at a local store, but the program cost $1.05 to run. So doing it at any scale quickly becomes a little bit silly.
So I guess my question is: who is having luck using these tools, and what are you using them for?
One route I had some success with is writing a DSL for scraping and then having the llm generate that code, then interpreting it and editing it when it gets stuck. But then there's the "getting stuck detection" part which is hard etc etc.
We currently are optimizing for reliability and quality, which is why we suggest Claude - but it can get expensive in some cases. Using Qwen 2.5-VL-72B will be significantly cheaper, though may not be always reliable.
Most of our usage right now is for running test cases, and people seem to often prefer qwen for that use case - since typically test cases are clearer how to execute.
Something that is top of mind for is is figuring out a good way to "cache" workflows that get taken. This way you can repeat automations either with no LLM or with a smaller/cheap LLM. This will would enable deterministic, repeatable flows, that are also very affordable and fast. So even if each step on the first run is only 95% reliable - if it gets through it, it could repeat it with 100% reliability.
You can also use cheaper models depending on your needs, for example Qwen 2.5 VL 72B is pretty affordable and works pretty well for most situations.