[HN Gopher] Show HN: Vibium - Browser automation for AI and huma...
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       Show HN: Vibium - Browser automation for AI and humans, by
       Selenium's creator
        
       i started the selenium project 21 years ago. vibium is what i'd
       build if i started over today with ai agents in mind. go binary
       under the hood (handles browser, bidi, mcp) but devs never see it.
       just npm install vibium. python/java coming. for claude code:
       claude mcp add vibium -- npx -y vibium v1 ships today. ama.
        
       Author : hugs
       Score  : 404 points
       Date   : 2025-12-24 17:49 UTC (1 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (github.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
        
       | christophilus wrote:
       | Nice. I was just thinking of building this very thing. Glad to
       | see I won't have to. I'll check it out after the holidays.
        
         | hugs wrote:
         | what specific things were you looking for?
        
           | christophilus wrote:
           | My use case is mainly to make it easier to show Claude Code a
           | problem with an SPA as I develop it. Claude's decent at
           | traditional server-rendered stuff, since it can curl and
           | reason a bit about the responses, but SPAs require something
           | more like your tool here.
        
             | xnx wrote:
             | You might try Google Antigravity since it is natively
             | designed to test in the browser as it codes.
        
       | anamexis wrote:
       | My number one question would be how it compares to Playwright --
       | differences in design goals, capabilities, advantages and
       | disadvantages.
        
         | hugs wrote:
         | it's a good questionn! i partially addressed this in the "why
         | vibium" section of the v1 announcement:
         | https://github.com/VibiumDev/vibium/blob/main/docs/updates/2...
         | 
         | to save a click, i'll post it here, too:
         | 
         | -----------
         | 
         | why vibium?
         | 
         | there are dozens of "ai-powered browser" tools now. so why this
         | one?
         | 
         | the selenium ecosystem is massive: millions of tests, thousands
         | of companies, decades of investment. but there's no obvious
         | bridge to the ai future. many have moved to playwright -- and
         | for good reason: it's fast, easy to use, has popular features
         | like auto-waiting, integrated video recording, and a ton of
         | other batteries included.
         | 
         | vibium takes the same approach. batteries included. great dx.
         | but built for where the industry is going: ai agents that need
         | to drive browsers.
         | 
         | when i did those interviews in september, the response wasn't
         | just "cool idea." it was relief. the community trusts us to
         | build this bridge because we built the last two: selenium in
         | 2004, appium in 2012.
         | 
         | community and ecosystem are the moat.
        
           | anamexis wrote:
           | Thanks! I don't think it really answers my question though.
           | 
           | AFAIK Playwright also takes the approach of batteries
           | included, great dx, and has a lot of good integration with AI
           | agents.
           | 
           | Basically, what sets Vibium apart?
        
             | therunninglight wrote:
             | vibium is hardly 2 days old. the 5-yr plan is grand.
             | quoting hugs "goal is to embrace what playwright has done
             | well, then extend what's possible".
        
               | anamexis wrote:
               | I appreciate that it's brand new, but I'm still very
               | interested in knowing about what sets it apart, even if
               | that is all just vision at this point. What does
               | "extending what's possible" mean?
        
               | hugs wrote:
               | i appreciate the persistence in getting an answer. :-)
               | 
               | i was being a little too cute using "embrace" and
               | "extend" in a previous comment (look up "embrace, extend,
               | extinguish"). sorry about that.
               | 
               | the big idea with vibium in v2 and beyond is to bring to
               | test automation something old and boring in robotics: the
               | "sense - think - act" loop. sensors observe the world, a
               | brain makes decisions, and actuators carry them out.
               | 
               | right now most browser tools extend what's possible at
               | the "act" layer. they make it easier for an llm to click,
               | type, and observe the browser.
               | 
               | that's useful, but it mostly enables one-off demos. every
               | run starts from scratch. there's no accumulated
               | understanding of the app, and long workflows are
               | navigated by guessing and retries.
               | 
               | what vibium is trying to extend is not just action, but
               | the loop.
               | 
               | vibium v1 is just the "act" part, which i'm calling
               | clicker. it clicks buttons, types, and navigates the
               | browser.
               | 
               | retina and cortex are coming in v2. retina turns real
               | interaction into durable signal (manual exploration,
               | existing tests, production usage). cortex builds on that
               | signal to create a navigable model of workflows that an
               | llm can plan through, instead of reasoning from raw html
               | each time.
               | 
               | clicker is the execution layer. playwright mcp largely
               | lives here. vibium clicker overlaps in scope, but is
               | designed from the start to feed sensing and planning
               | rather than being the whole system.
               | 
               | so yes, playwright mcp covers part of this. what's
               | missing today is first-class sense and think. that's the
               | gap vibium is exploring, even if v1 only ships the act
               | layer.
               | 
               | tl;dr:
               | 
               | sense -> retina (v2)
               | 
               | think -> cortex (v2)
               | 
               | act -> clicker (v1)
               | 
               | i've spent the past few months talking about applying the
               | "sense - think - act" loop to browser automation, but at
               | some point i realized i needed to "talk less, ship more".
               | :-) i'm looking forward to shipping retina and cortex so
               | we can see whether the full loop is actually a step
               | change beyond what playwright or playwright+mcp can do.
               | 
               | happy to dig deeper if helpful.
        
               | anamexis wrote:
               | extremely cool, thank you!!
        
       | suchintan wrote:
       | This is very cool. We were thinking about doing something very
       | similar with Skyvern
       | 
       | What was the reason you went down this path instead of extending
       | selenium with AI features?
        
         | hugs wrote:
         | i partially addressed this in the "why vibium" section of the
         | v1 announcement:
         | https://github.com/VibiumDev/vibium/blob/main/docs/updates/2...
         | 
         | but why a new thing vs extending selenium? it's a little
         | complicated, but neither selenium nor playwright were designed
         | with ai in mind from day 1. with vibium, i'm optimizing for
         | "vibe coding" and ai-driven workflows first.
        
           | suchintan wrote:
           | This makes sense. I guess I wanted to understand why starting
           | from scratch was better than "fixing" selenium, but perhaps
           | "fixing" selenium isn't an option?
        
             | hugs wrote:
             | for the entire testing tools industry, in some ways,
             | selenium was the "final boss" to beat. every new tool had
             | to trash selenium in their marketing. eventually those "hit
             | points" added up. "fixing selenium" is as much as of a
             | branding problem as it is a technical problem. "oh, there's
             | a new version of selenium? i heard selenium sucks!" is
             | actually a problem that has to be dealt with. an entire new
             | generation of coders only know "playwright rules, selenium
             | drools".
             | 
             | of course, i have a new host of problems by going all in
             | with "vibium"... i'm making a huge bet that "vibe coding"
             | is a trend, not a fad. (it could still be a fad! we'll see
             | if this post ages well soon enough!)
        
               | suchintan wrote:
               | That makes a lot of sense. Sometimes it's easier to leave
               | the baggage behind. It's too bad..selenium is a
               | masterpiece. Thanks for sharing it with the world
        
       | moss_dog wrote:
       | I'd love to be able to lock down the browser to only allow
       | certain URLs (e.g. localhost) so I can give Claude (and other
       | tools) carte blanche to use browser automation (rather than
       | manually approving each command). Is this something on your radar
       | / roadmap?
        
         | ramoz wrote:
         | If using Claude Code, a simple hook can govern
         | `browser_navigate` (mcp)
         | 
         | A custom sh script or something for whitelists would take ~5min
         | to setup.
         | 
         | For more robust governance (many policies), you can write Rego
         | using https://github.com/eqtylab/cupcake
         | 
         | https://code.claude.com/docs/en/hooks#mcp-tool-naming
        
           | moss_dog wrote:
           | Thank you for the links / info! I'm looking forward to
           | digging into this.
        
         | hugs wrote:
         | fully aware of the "blast radius" risk of using claude to do
         | stuff. i'm doing all my vibium dev in a vm using UTM (and you
         | should, too!). wonder if there are some network rules we can
         | add.
         | 
         | i did post a v2 roadmap on the github repo. might be time to
         | start the draft for v3!
        
         | falcor84 wrote:
         | As I see it, the only real solution is to put it into a
         | container that has a firewall with a short whitelist.
        
           | moss_dog wrote:
           | I was looking into this earlier -- presumably you'd also need
           | to allowlist Claude itself (whatever endpoints it hits to run
           | inference etc). VM firewall gets a little trickier with
           | Claude's web search tool, too.
           | 
           | The solution I landed on recently was to locally modify the
           | Chrome devtools MCP to launch the browser instance with
           | strict network restrictions. I believe the implementation
           | used `--host-resolver-rules`, blocking all URLs by default
           | with an environment variable to control the allowlist (which,
           | in hindsight, Claude can easily work around if it needs to --
           | I should probably just hard-code the allowlist).
        
             | falcor84 wrote:
             | > you'd also need to allowlist Claude itself
             | 
             | This is Anthropic's recommended setup for devcontainers:
             | 
             | https://github.com/anthropics/claude-
             | code/blob/main/.devcont...
             | 
             | You may want to adapt it and particularly to remove the
             | GitHub and VS Code stuff.
        
       | mannanj wrote:
       | Hi this looks really valuable, thanks for developing and sharing.
       | Would you share some use cases and how you or your users use it
       | personally? would love to see some examples and feel the aha
       | "That's how I'd like to use it too!" and it would help me drive
       | and se the problems I have as being solvable by this too rather
       | than seeing a tool/solution looking for a problem. (not implying
       | you're that, but without examples/use cases that's the default
       | way I think)
        
         | hugs wrote:
         | lots of people have already been posting examples of how they
         | used vibium on linkedin. (code's only been available for a day
         | or two, so we're just getting started!)
         | 
         | we also have a new discord server for the project that we just
         | spun up and will be opening up more widely soon. discord could
         | be a good place to share uses cases and experiments until we
         | set up a more formal website structure).
        
       | rancar2 wrote:
       | I wasn't able to gather the future state plans beyond what's
       | noted in the V2 plans:
       | 
       | https://github.com/VibiumDev/vibium/blob/main/V2-ROADMAP.md
       | 
       | What's next 5 years look like given that you are very good at
       | building long-term projects that last and evolve through time?
       | And for a very specific example, what's the plan for
       | incorporating new standards like Agent Skills as they quickly
       | evolve and launch?
        
         | hugs wrote:
         | short term: yeah, we should totally add agent skills asap! new
         | year's eve goal?
         | 
         | as far as long term plans go, i like the tim o'reilly quote:
         | "create more value than you capture".
         | 
         | with selenium, we created an entire ecosystem of tools, users,
         | companies, and economic activity. (literally billions of usd --
         | it's a story frequently ignored by the tech press when looking
         | for "open source success stories".) but i hope to do the same
         | with vibium. there will likely be a hosted "vibium.cloud"
         | hosted service. i also hope there will be lots of them. in a
         | similar way, there weren't many "hosted selenium" services when
         | i started sauce labs. now there's a bunch. browserstack,
         | lambdatest, etc.
         | 
         | it was also not really an accident we did that with selenium.
         | there is a lot of behind-the-scenes consensus building that
         | happens to make things like a w3c webdriver standard happen.
         | (funfact: vibium relies on the new! w3c standard "webdriver
         | bidi" protocol heavily inspired by the chrome devtools protocol
         | used by playwright. (tl;dr: it's just json over websockets.)
         | 
         | i'm betting on industry cooperation, standards, and shared
         | prosperity. that's my 5 year plan!
        
       | hcoura wrote:
       | How does it handle context bloat between the browser and the llm?
       | 
       | Any plans of exposing more of the browser? For instance
       | playwright is able to store tracing files the agent may decide to
       | read to understand some requests / payloads...
       | 
       | Any plans on allowing the agent to run an arbitrary js script?
        
         | hugs wrote:
         | i definitely have plans to expose more of the browser! at the
         | moment, it's very limited. i'm not sure if anyone has
         | completely nailed the context bloat problem -- it's worth more
         | study and benchmarking. i suspect the long term answer is
         | "don't use mcp". but mcp (warts and all) felt like a table-
         | stakes feature for a v1 release.
         | 
         | also need to clarify: there are two apis exposed right now: the
         | mcp server and a "plain old" js/ts api. the js/api does have
         | the ability to run arbitrary js. theoretically, you could ask
         | an agent to write a vibium script with the js/ts library, and
         | have the ai run _that_... (which ironically? is also a way to
         | deal with the issue of context bloat)
        
       | michelb wrote:
       | Interesting, I've been using this skill
       | https://github.com/SawyerHood/dev-browser to save on context and
       | get some more speed. Will try this out!
        
         | hugs wrote:
         | yeah, looking to play more with (and support) skills with
         | vibium soon.
        
           | chews wrote:
           | big virtual hugs for @hugs... thank you for the Christmas
           | gift of fewer keystrokes :-)
        
       | nivekney wrote:
       | Aside from the project itself, I am learning a lot just from
       | reading the commits. Mostly about the process when one knows how
       | they'd do it.
       | 
       | https://github.com/VibiumDev/vibium/commits/main/?after=ffc3...
        
         | therunninglight wrote:
         | likewise, watching it take shape in real time is fascinating
        
         | hugs wrote:
         | thanks. if ai-assisted development is the future of software
         | (and i think it is), it was important i put my money where my
         | mouth is and develop it by doing exactly that.
        
       | ripped_britches wrote:
       | What is the benefit of using this instead of playwright?
        
         | hugs wrote:
         | it will be more obvious in v2.
         | 
         | v1 is about getting to a base-line of functionality.
         | 
         | things get interesting in v2:
         | https://github.com/VibiumDev/vibium/blob/main/V2-ROADMAP.md
        
       | badlogic wrote:
       | Neat. Any reason why the MCP server doesn't expose a
       | JavaScript/eval tool? Current models excel at writing JS to drive
       | and inspect the DOM. They aren't great at driving browsers via
       | screenshots.
        
         | hugs wrote:
         | > why the MCP server doesn't expose a JavaScript/eval tool?
         | 
         | no reason other than my number #1 goal was "ship something". i
         | only started the actual coding on dec 11. it's been a bit of a
         | sprint the last two weeks!
         | 
         | though "image-based" vs "dom-based" testing approaches is a
         | very big topic! (look forward to researching that more in the
         | future.)
         | 
         | v1 announcement:
         | https://github.com/VibiumDev/vibium/blob/main/docs/updates/2...
        
         | coty wrote:
         | FWIW, if you have Claude Code or the like, you can quickly
         | prompt your way to an eval function in MCP. It already exists
         | in clicker and the client API. You can use it to get the
         | accessibility tree, for example, and use that to find what to
         | fill out and click.
        
       | 999900000999 wrote:
       | As someone who's made a good living primarily in UI automation
       | for over a decade, thank you.
       | 
       | It's been an interesting journey.I do think Playwright is the
       | defacto standard now, but Selenium was the original browser
       | driver.
       | 
       | Anyway, how does Vibium compare to Playwright ? Playwright's main
       | advantage is it has official support for multiple languages.
        
         | hugs wrote:
         | > I do think Playwright is the defacto standard now
         | 
         | i'll politely pushback a little. i think it's safe (at this
         | moment in time) to say: playwright wins the first derivative,
         | but selenium wins the "area under the curve". selenium is very
         | entrenched in many parts of the world, especially outside of
         | SF/USA. part of the inbound interest i've been getting for
         | vibium is from those selenium users who want some kind of
         | bridge to the future, but didn't have an obvious path forward
         | beyond "dump selenium, adopt playwright"...
         | 
         | part of my plan with vibium post-v1 is to give that massive
         | (and it truly is massive, i'm not bragging) installed base of
         | selenium users an upgrade path to more agentic coding options.
        
           | steve_adams_86 wrote:
           | Selenium is distinctly more popular among scientists in my
           | experience. I've only seen playwright at startups.
        
             | therunninglight wrote:
             | same in my experience.
        
             | 999900000999 wrote:
             | I've personally implemented Playwright in a large
             | enterprise company. Puppeteer before that.
             | 
             | Generally if you have a lot of legacy selenium scripts it's
             | probably not worth it to switch everything over, but if
             | you're creating a new UI automation framework I've just
             | never seen selenium as a first choice for that.
             | 
             | Don't get me wrong it's still solid technology though.
        
               | therunninglight wrote:
               | yes, i've noticed some tendency for [agentic] qa services
               | to go the puppeteer and then playwright route (sometimes
               | either or). it's almost too easy to get running with pw.
               | and, hence, enticing for any startup that wants to get
               | off the ground asap and break even. seems vibium may tap
               | into that startup market as it matures.
               | 
               | legacy selenium suites are a strong contender for vibium
               | adoption. i think hugs has been surveying a ton of folks,
               | he may have a better bird's eye view of the potential
               | user base.
               | 
               | as for academic use of selenium, we have boni garcia -
               | maker/popularizer or selenium webdriver manager teaching
               | at a uni in spain. (maybe an isolated example, but he's
               | rather known in the community)
        
             | zenmac wrote:
             | Isn't Selenium vs Playwright more a Java vs JS/ES/TS thing?
        
               | hugs wrote:
               | i started the selenium project as just a js and python
               | thing. but it got really popular in java circles.
               | 
               | vibium will also be a big tent project and support ts/js,
               | python, java, and as many other languages we can support,
               | too. but i started with ts/js because that's what's
               | extremely popular right now. (and i like js!)
               | 
               | (side-note: i f'ing love nim, we will be supporting nim,
               | too. getting nim on the tiobe top 20 is on my bucket
               | list.)
        
           | 999900000999 wrote:
           | Are you solo developing vibium ?
           | 
           | Playwright really simplifies getting setup. It won't work for
           | everyone, but within 30 seconds Playwright will download it's
           | needed browsers along with a test runner.
           | 
           | I also find the documentation is much better/consolidated.
           | 
           | Definitely open to helping you out if I can be of assistance.
        
             | hugs wrote:
             | "npm install vibium" installs the needed browser on
             | install.
             | 
             | right now, code-wise -- for the code you see in github at
             | the moment -- it's just me and my ai pal, claude. but
             | there's a growing cast of (human!) characters also helping
             | with all the other things we need to do to run a successful
             | project. patches and tokens welcome!
        
               | 999900000999 wrote:
               | Would you suggest Vibium as ready for production use?
               | 
               | On second thought not being controlled by Microsoft might
               | be good enough to differentiate it from playwright. It's
               | not a good idea for a single company to control so much.
               | 
               | I'm thinking their needs to be an easy way to sandbox
               | vibe automation. I don't want to accidentally click an ad
               | and vibe test an unrelated website .
        
               | hugs wrote:
               | it's just v1. good for experimenting, not for production
               | (yet!).
               | 
               | and yes, it's perhaps impolite and silently taboo for me
               | to say it out loud, but "not being controlled by
               | microsoft" is on the top 10 list of "why vibium and not
               | playwright". most of the sf world has gone all-in on
               | playwright; i'm betting on web standards. i hope people
               | will notice that distinction. however, i realize vibium
               | can't win just as the "not microsoft" option; it will
               | also need to win on the merits.
               | 
               | microsoft is already incredibly well-positioned to own
               | the whole dev stack. from their investment in openai to
               | vscode, github, and playwright... they are in a powerful
               | position. i'm old enough to remember the last time ms had
               | massive power over the stack (see: internet explorer 6).
        
               | 999900000999 wrote:
               | Not to mention they own NPM( GitHub owns NPM).
               | 
               | C# is fantastic and Playwright's C# support is extremely
               | good. I've been in the C# ecosystem for years, but I'm
               | still a bit worried about having a single company control
               | so much of my livelihood. Let's just say I have a little
               | bit of experience with Microsoft, they don't particularly
               | pay well so I'm a little confused as to if they can
               | maintain so many frameworks indefinitely.
               | 
               | Are you going to keep Vibium a community project, or you
               | hoping to raise capital/bootstrap.
               | 
               | Don't get me wrong, I absolutely love what you're doing
               | but I don't know if one person can create something so
               | complex. The good news is Chrome is the only browser most
               | normal people use, which reduces the amount of testing
               | you have to actually do.
               | 
               | At the vast majority of places I've worked at we
               | basically just test on Chrome and then if it doesn't work
               | on other browsers ohh well. Every now and then you would
               | get a project manager who would suggest adding
               | Firefox/Safari testing. But it's never been a priority.
        
               | the_gipsy wrote:
               | So it's vibecoded?
        
               | hugs wrote:
               | it's named vibium for a reason.
        
           | jjmarr wrote:
           | Selenium was a part of my degree. I had a course involving
           | it.
        
         | maxloh wrote:
         | Any idea how did Puppeteer lose the race?
        
           | 999900000999 wrote:
           | The Puppeteer team moved to from Google, to Microsoft and
           | started Playwright.
           | 
           | https://blog.logrocket.com/playwright-vs-puppeteer/
        
             | hugs wrote:
             | google fell victim to one of the classic blunders. the most
             | famous of which is inventing the transformer behind gpt but
             | not productizing it first. but only slightly less well-
             | known is this: letting puppeteer go without a plan.
        
       | starik36 wrote:
       | How do you install it into Claude Desktop? I tried the following,
       | but it fails.                   "vibium": {           "command":
       | "npx",           "args": [             "-y",
       | "@vibium/mcp@latest"           ]         }
        
         | therunninglight wrote:
         | "vibium": {
         | 
         | "command": "npx",
         | 
         | "args": [
         | 
         | "-y",
         | 
         | "vibium"
         | 
         | ]
         | 
         | }
         | 
         | source: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/apzal-bahin_ai-mcp-
         | browseraut...
        
       | jeff4f5da2 wrote:
       | Since it's in go, wouldn't it be great if it also expose go api?
        
         | hugs wrote:
         | yes, yes it would!
        
       | captainregex wrote:
       | entirely possible I'm just really bad at this stuff but I can't
       | get browser agents to do simple report pulls without running into
       | a captcha or a dropdown menu that breaks its brain. hopefully
       | this is the one!
        
         | hugs wrote:
         | good security will always be the eternal enemy of easy
         | automation.
        
           | therunninglight wrote:
           | the realm of bots vs bots
        
       | rukuu001 wrote:
       | Hey man, just wanted to say thanks for Selenium - it was a game
       | changer and had a big impact on my professional life.
       | 
       | I'm interested in checking out Vibium - I've been a reluctant
       | adopter of Playwright and hopeful for a new approach.
        
         | hugs wrote:
         | playwright got a lot of things right. one of the big ones was a
         | fast websockets+json way to drive the browser. (vibium is using
         | the w3c standard equivalent - webdriver bidi). but they also
         | raised the bar on usability and developer experience. i hope to
         | get to the level of "click, click, awesome" out-of-the-box
         | experience that playwright did so well.
        
         | pkiv wrote:
         | If you're already using Playwright, I'd love for you to give
         | Stagehand a try (https://github.com/browserbase/stagehand) - it
         | has compatible-ish API, but built for automation, not testing.
        
           | hugs wrote:
           | stagehand is good stuff!
        
           | zenmac wrote:
           | Hmmm so it is basically using https://www.director.ai for the
           | AI natural language stuff right?
        
             | brianjking wrote:
             | Director.ai uses Stagehand, which is made by Browserbase.
        
         | irjustin wrote:
         | > I've been a reluctant adopter of Playwright and hopeful for a
         | new approach.
         | 
         | Out of curiosity, why?
         | 
         | Personally, I'm a massive lover of playwright. Flakiness has
         | been so much lower for us.
        
         | m00dy wrote:
         | I think the future is mobile when it comes AI agents, If you
         | are also looking for a new approach, I would suggest
         | DeepWalker. It is mobile first automation, currently works on
         | android.
         | 
         | [0]: https://deepwalker.xyz
        
       | dmd wrote:
       | Does it allow you to inject js, modify the DOM, and most
       | crucially monitor/modify network requests? I do those things in
       | probably 95-99% of the time I reach for playwright mcp in claude,
       | and from the "For Agents" part of the README, it seems like all
       | this can do is click/type/screenshot?
        
         | hugs wrote:
         | > inject js, modify the DOM, and most crucially monitor/modify
         | network requests
         | 
         | not yet. definitely on the roadmap, though. goal is to embrace
         | what playwright has done well, then extend what's possible...
        
           | dmd wrote:
           | Thanks. I would love to understand what people are doing with
           | Playwright that _doesn 't_ involve those things. I really
           | can't recall ever using it where that wasn't what I was
           | doing. I use it letting Claude fix things. You can't fix what
           | you can't see! What else are people using it for? Obviously
           | there must be a (very popular!) use case for "just clicking",
           | but I can't seem to imagine it.
        
             | hugs wrote:
             | don't underestimate the "just clicking" use case!
        
               | therunninglight wrote:
               | hugs built an entire career on the "click" case (just
               | making a button work). no wonder, the vibium go binary us
               | called "clicker".
        
             | VoidWhisperer wrote:
             | In my experience, we've used playwright significantly for
             | unit/integration tests combining it with react-testing-
             | library to verify individual components and also whole
             | (mocked, we used something else that I can't seem to
             | remember for E2E tests) flows within that React application
        
             | Robdel12 wrote:
             | To me doing network interception in browser driven tests is
             | a smell like that. Unless you're running vs a full mocked
             | server (like MSW).
             | 
             | I'm a big fan of testing exactly like a user. Users don't
             | use network intercepts, timeouts, etc. All of my most
             | reliable tests assert on DOM state. If the user doesn't see
             | it, don't assert on it.
        
               | dmd wrote:
               | Almost nothing I do has to do with what users actually
               | see though. It's all things like "why didn't the SSO flow
               | work".
        
               | mewpmewp2 wrote:
               | I guess the issue is that real world does smell terribly.
               | I wish I could just have the perfect World like my side
               | projects always have, but not the case with the
               | commercial ones making money.
        
         | doctorpangloss wrote:
         | all i want is monitored network requests, because flutter +
         | amazon appsync apps are so radioactive
        
           | hugs wrote:
           | good feedback. thank you!
        
       | j2kun wrote:
       | Is this something you use to generate static browser tests that
       | no longer use the LLM? Or would you need to use the LLM every
       | time you run the tests?
        
         | therunninglight wrote:
         | - No LLM Getting Started with Vibium (beginner-friendly):
         | https://github.com/VibiumDev/vibium/blob/main/docs/tutorials...
         | 
         | - MCP option (where tokens will eventually get burned) Getting
         | Started with Vibium MCP:
         | https://github.com/VibiumDev/vibium/blob/main/docs/tutorials...
        
       | rahimnathwani wrote:
       | If an agent gets a copy of the screen using browser_screenshot
       | and then wants to click somewhere on that screen, how is it meant
       | to find the right css selector to pass to browser_click?
       | 
       | There's a browser_find method, but that assumes you already know
       | what type of element it is. But I can't always tell what type of
       | element something is just by looking at a screenshot.
       | 
       | What have I missed or misunderstood?
        
         | coty wrote:
         | For right now, the MCP server doesn't expose quite enough to
         | navigate on its own.
         | 
         | I've added a browser_evaluate tool in my fork--though I haven't
         | committed or pushed a PR yet. With that, the agent can call
         | JavaScript to get the accessibility tree and then use that to
         | navigate via browser_find.
         | 
         | This and much more will be coming soon. See the V2 roadmap for
         | more insight:
         | https://github.com/VibiumDev/vibium/blob/main/V2-ROADMAP.md
        
           | hugs wrote:
           | one of the wild things about vibe coding is... i want to add
           | that feature, but i'm slightly more interested in using the
           | prompt/spec you might have used to create it, not the patch
           | itself.
        
             | rahimnathwani wrote:
             | Sometimes an AI-written spec based on the code is better
             | than that the spec/prompts used to create the patch.
        
       | OutOfHere wrote:
       | I will wait for full Python and Go support.
        
         | therunninglight wrote:
         | python client coming soon to PyPi
        
         | hugs wrote:
         | have plans for new year's eve?
        
       | jstummbillig wrote:
       | Cool. Can this currently be used with codex in the same way?
        
         | hugs wrote:
         | not today. but the plan is to be very "big tent" and support as
         | many options as possible.
        
       | michaelsbradley wrote:
       | Anyone attempting something similar for Qt/QML based apps?
        
       | pryelluw wrote:
       | Any plans to support local models through llama.cpp or similar?
        
         | hugs wrote:
         | 100% yes. favorites?
        
           | pryelluw wrote:
           | I daily drive llama.cpp so that please.
        
             | hugs wrote:
             | which local models? (e.g. qwen, llama, mistral?)
        
       | didip wrote:
       | And this handles login sessions, cookies, etc.? So much of the
       | modern web is now hidden behind login sessions.
        
         | hugs wrote:
         | there's generally only 3 ways to make money in browser
         | automation:
         | 
         | 1) test automation (my specialty)
         | 
         | 2) data scraping / crawling
         | 
         | 3) business/robotic process automation (e.g. back-office data
         | entry, processing invoices, etc.)
         | 
         | when it comes to handling login sessions, cookies, etc. test
         | automation is the easiest. (you create disposable test logins
         | and use them in each test. it's mostly a solved problem.)
         | 
         | handling logins is a way gnarlier problem in data scraping and
         | business process automation. i'm focused on test automation in
         | v1. (i'm hoping experts in data scraping and process automation
         | can help me improve vibium in this regard.)
        
       | palidanx wrote:
       | Sorry, I kind of have a dumb question here. So we have a bunch of
       | legacy selenium scripts that do end to end user testing, and
       | occasion they break (either because of a network error, or devs
       | committed something that breaks a test).
       | 
       | We were looking at seeing if a model could look at the screenshot
       | of the failure, some of the original website source code, and try
       | to fix the failing test.
       | 
       | My question is with vibium, would it make more sense to port the
       | legacy tests over to vibium, and if a test fail, use its
       | capabilities to try to self-heal?
        
         | hugs wrote:
         | i apologize, but i'll answer your question with a metaphor.
         | 
         | i want to build an island resort _and_ a bridge from the
         | mainland to get there. do i build the island resort first or
         | the bridge first?
         | 
         | here's my thinking: if the resort is popular and a fun place to
         | be, there will be a huge incentive to build the bridge next.
         | but we might also find out that building the bridge will
         | ultimately be economically impractical and we should just stick
         | to using ferry boats. at least we'll have a cool island resort
         | to go to, though!
         | 
         | so for now, i'm just focusing on building the island resort at
         | the moment. but i really, really want to build that bridge,
         | too, asap.
        
       | eth0up wrote:
       | I recently conducted a little research project involving YouTube
       | comments, where selenium made it possible. Quite cool to see the
       | legend here, still active.
       | 
       | Thanks, from a very tiny human.
        
         | hugs wrote:
         | thanks for using it! <heart-emoji/>
         | 
         | i try to say this often, but it never feels like enough: yes, i
         | started the project, but it's a relay race. i ran the first few
         | laps, but the project has been going for 21 years now. there's
         | dozens (hundreds?) of people to thank at this point for the
         | success and impact that the selenium project has achieved.
        
       | jaredwy wrote:
       | Hey! You really helped my career. We chatted a lot maybe 13-15
       | years ago and really helped atlassian scale their selenium tests
       | at the time.
       | 
       | So glad to see you are still in this space!
        
       | saikatsg wrote:
       | The good old days of browser automation! Thanks a lot for
       | Selenium and all the best for Vibium :)
        
         | hugs wrote:
         | thanks!
        
       | mintflow wrote:
       | great project, just add the mcp and try in claude code, it
       | automatically help me to broser a local forum and give a summary
       | of hot posts today.
       | 
       | this is the second MCP i added, quit impressive.
       | 
       | Merry christmas!
        
       | xpe wrote:
       | I'm thinking about various security models. When it comes to
       | browser integration, I'm particularly interested in defense-in-
       | depth rather than trusting the shIP activities to the captAIn.
       | 
       | Bad puns aside, this is an important area! Many of us want to
       | know what people are building (or should be built) to put
       | security front and center -- or at least integrated --rather than
       | an afterthought. Components might include: sandboxing, access
       | rules, logging, honey-pot mode, perhaps even read-only access for
       | a "protector" agent. (Another common approach here is wishful
       | thinking such as "this ship is unsinkable", but that ship has
       | sailed for me.)
       | 
       | Putting on my dark humor hat, if all else fails, there could be a
       | "time to panic" mode triggered by certain criteria (e.g. a regex
       | matching "your bank account balance is $0").
       | 
       | What can biology teach us? When you think about defense-in-depth
       | for "insider threats" in the human body, what comes to mind?
       | There are many; here is one: reflexes. Your motor planning
       | neurons might send your hand towards a hot surface and succeed,
       | but they will be quickly countermanded [1] by a reflex arc [2].
       | 
       | P.S. Please don't interpret my style as a lack of seriousness. If
       | used carelessly, this technology opens up some impressive botnet
       | potential. Luckily, with the benefit of wishful thinking or just
       | flat-out ignorance, we can trust humans and AIs to be adequately
       | trustworthy. [2] [3]
       | 
       | [1]: maybe overruled is a better term?
       | 
       | [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reflex_arc
       | 
       | [3]:
       | https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2007/02/the_psycholog...
       | 
       | [4]: https://www.anthropic.com/research/agentic-misalignment
        
       | gsnedders wrote:
       | Is there any plan about how to deal with indirect prompt
       | injection attacks that could trivially be lurking in malicious
       | web pages, given the agent can navigate to an arbitrary URL?
        
         | hugs wrote:
         | short-term mediation is always always always run it in a
         | virtual machine with as minimal credentials as possible.
        
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