jonasnelle

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by jonasnelle 2y ago
If you just want a job that pays the bills, I respect your decision, but you should not apply. The hardest and most important problems won't be solved working 9-5, 5 days a week. Nobody feels like they "have to" come in on Sa
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by jonasnelle 2y ago
Autotab (YC S23) | Founding Engineer | NYC | 6 days a week in the office If AGI is going to 100x GDP, it will need to be able to use a computer. Autotab is the first digital robot that controls a computer like a human. It excels at the high
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Autotab (YC S23) Is Hiring Founding Engineers to Build the Digital Robot(ycombinator.com)
1 points by jonasnelle 2y ago
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by jonasnelle 3y ago
I think there are two main reason the fully "self-driving" end-to-end agents that demo well don't work. 1. Planning is hard and exponential decay: Most demos try to start with a single sentence e.g. "order me a Dominos p
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by jonasnelle 3y ago
Have been digging into Playwright a bit - can you say more about the trace viewing to step through a script execution? Very curious!
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by jonasnelle 3y ago
Fyi we fixed this so now you can get an API key at autotab.com/dashboard and then that is sufficient to authenticate when you run `autotab record`, no more logging in to Google in the Selenium browser!
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by jonasnelle 3y ago
I agree, to really debug they need coding knowledge today. But there's something in between where you can say "try again" or even give high level feedback like "don't click the element with that exact title, just cl
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by jonasnelle 3y ago
Katalon looks like a cool project, hadn’t heard of them before! We’re more focused on automations as opposed to testing, which is most important for where we take the product next. More focus for us on handling tasks that are less determini
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by jonasnelle 3y ago
We’re actually mainly focused on automations more than testing. We want to build autotab into your intern/assistant for browser-based tasks that you would rather have someone else do. For example, autotab helped a designer automate cli
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by jonasnelle 3y ago
Yes, we process the contents of the page when users are recording on our servers but don’t store the page HTML. I don’t see any world in which we would sell data, but in case you’re worried about the security of our servers I’m not sure the
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by jonasnelle 3y ago
Thanks so much! Glad to hear it
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by jonasnelle 3y ago
That’s super helpful, thanks for explaining!
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by jonasnelle 3y ago
Interesting! We are more focused on automations as opposed to testing - would you say the same applies there as well? Also Selenium does have 10x the downloads of Playwright on PyPI - is Python different or do you think that metric is misle
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by jonasnelle 3y ago
Interesting! I think the way we’ll handle this is the sane way we handle Google 2FA atm: We have you log in and do 2FA manually once, then we save the logged out cookies. Why the logged out cookies? That way even if someone gets the cookies
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by jonasnelle 3y ago
How’d you guess my secret plan? ;) Definitely in the cards going forward
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by jonasnelle 3y ago
Thanks! Excited to see what you do with it BrowserBox looks cool, I couldn’t tell from the README what browser engine it uses. Did you build your own?
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by jonasnelle 3y ago
Yes! Two things we’re working on that would be very cool are 1) seeing the mirrored actions executed live as you record and 2) even if the website changes later, using AI at runtime to auto-heal the automation.
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by jonasnelle 3y ago
Unfortunately we have no plans to support R at the moment, though in my experience GPT4 is pretty good at translating code between languages
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by jonasnelle 3y ago
Interesting, can you say more about why you prefer Playwright’s selectors? Helpful to have some anecdotes from real experience!
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by jonasnelle 3y ago
We currently only allow log in with Google for logging in to autotab itself, but will add login with username/password and other options soon! Depending on feedback we might also build a bring your own Open AI API key option
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by jonasnelle 3y ago
Couldn’t agree more! Working on this actively. Interesting questions include 1) what format is most effective for the user to convey their intent (maybe not point & click) and 2) how to represent the model output such that it is auditab
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by jonasnelle 3y ago
Right now the generated script is the ground truth but we’ve been working on augmenting this with images & videos to fall back on. We think defaulting to code is good because it is faster, cheaper and more easy to reason about in the 95
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by jonasnelle 3y ago
That’s exactly what we do - we sample relevant parts of the DOM and use the model to write the logic for selecting that element. This works pretty well and saves a lot of time that developers otherwise spend inspecting the html structure to
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by jonasnelle 3y ago
We use OpenAI's GPT4 to understand the position of the element being interacted with relative to the structure of the website overall. Lots of cool things we want to try out with open source models, but for now GPT4 is good enough.
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by jonasnelle 3y ago
The main difference is probably that autotab outputs a Python script, which is easier to integrate with existing Python codebases. Going forward I think the flexibility of Python code & the Python ecosystem will make it easier to build
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by jonasnelle 3y ago
Good to know! The comments have definitely made us update towards looking into Playwright again quite seriously
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by jonasnelle 3y ago
This is very interesting, may I ask what macros you would define? Definitely something I'd like to learn more about
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by jonasnelle 3y ago
Hm, that unfortunately sounds like a chromium/Chromedriver error which can be somewhat finicky. I recommend check that the versions you're using match (`chromedriver --version` and at chrome://settings/help). Let me
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by jonasnelle 3y ago
Hey, we're looking to build out our library of authentication plugins. Many websites offer "Sign in with Google" which makes things easier, you can just specify that in the autotab.yaml file. If you have a specific website in
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by jonasnelle 3y ago
Thanks! It's still very much early days for the Sidepanel and the API feels very much in flux but an exciting new form factor for browser-integrated experiences. Makes total sense, supporting other browsers is likely something we will

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