[HN Gopher] Launch HN: Kampala (YC W26) - Reverse-Engineer Apps ...
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Launch HN: Kampala (YC W26) - Reverse-Engineer Apps into APIs
Hey! I am Alex and together with my co-founder Tarun built Kampala
(https://www.zatanna.ai/kampala). It's a man-in-the-middle (MITM)
style proxy that allows you to agentically reverse engineer
existing workflows without brittle browser automation or computer
use agents. It works for websites, mobile apps, desktop apps.
Demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_PeostC-b4. Many people
spend hours per day in legacy dashboards and on-prem solutions
reconciling data across platforms. Current attempts at automation
use browser automations or computer use agents which are brittle,
slow, and nondeterministic. I come from a web reverse engineering
background and spent the last 7-8 years building integrations by
hand for sneaker/ticket releases, sportsbooks logins, and
everything in\ between. During that time I consulted for several
companies and brought them off of browser based infrastructure into
the requests layer. When we started Zatanna (that's our company
name) we worked in dental tech, which meant we had to deal with
tons of insurance payer dashboards and legacy dental-practice
solutions. Our superpower (as a fairly undifferentiated voice
agent/front desk assistant company) was that we could integrate
with nearly any system requested. During this time we built
extensive tooling (including what we're now calling Kampala) to
allow us to spin up these integrations quickly. Existing MITM
proxies and tooling didn't work for a few reasons: (1) They
manipulated the TLS and HTTP2 fingerprint over the wire which was
detected by strict anti-bots. (2) They had bad MCPs which did not
adequately expose necessary features like scripts/replay. (3) They
did not allow for building workflows or actions given a sample or
sequence of requests. As the tools we built got more powerful, we
began to use them internally to scrape conference attendees,
connect to external PMS systems, and interact with slack apps. I
even sent it to my property manager mom, who (with a lot of help
from me lol), automated 2-3 hours of billing information entry in
Yardi. At that point we realized that this wasn't really about
dentistry :) Because Kampala is a MITM, it is able to leverage
existing session tokens/anti-bot cookies and automate things
deterministically in seconds. You can either use our agent harness
that directly creates scripts/apis by prompting you with what
actions to make, or our MCP by manually doing a workflow once, and
asking your preferred coding agent to use Kampala to make a
script/API to replicate it. Once you have an API/script, you can
export, run, or even have us host it for you. We think the future
of automation does not consist of sending screenshots of webpages
to LLMs, but instead using the layer below that computers actually
understand. Excited to hear your thoughts/questions/feedback!
Author : alexblackwell_
Score : 62 points
Date : 2026-04-16 15:19 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.zatanna.ai)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.zatanna.ai)
| Sytten wrote:
| Interesting product (Caido co-founder here). It is very hard to
| nail auth, probably the most underlooked aspect by end users. We
| are working on something similar for PoC reproduction of
| vulnerabilities.
|
| Fingerprinting is also a hard thing to match perfectly, I would
| be curious to know what your strategy is on that. My experience
| has been that unless you bundle multiple TLS lib it is almost
| impossible to do at 100% because none of the lib cover all the
| TLS extensions.
| alexblackwell_ wrote:
| We're currently running a variety of stuff for TLS/HTTP2. If
| you download you can see the full trace of the connection. We
| dump the TLS connection byte for byte with the different
| structured subsections. With tls.peet.ws and bogdann finn's
| tls-client (which we use parts of with some modifications) I
| would say that http3/tcp fingerprinting is probably the
| remaining issue. We currently don't support http3 connections
| (they're niche + apple system proxy doesn't support them well),
| and TCP fingerprinting is a bit too low level to build out
| tooling in GO currently. Possibly for a later release. Curious
| if you've tried bogdann finn/the existing tooling?
| Sytten wrote:
| We are in Rust so our options are more limited. Make sense
| the golang ecosystem is pretty good for that.
| mkirsten wrote:
| Cool! Links on the page doesn't work, at least not for me, e.g.,
| https://www.zatanna.ai/kampala#how-it-works
|
| Also not clear on the page if it is apps from the local machine
| or on the network. Maybe some clearer examples and use cases
| would help?
| alexblackwell_ wrote:
| Oops now realizing that pattern where we send you to bottom
| latest download link is definitely confusing. Fixed so that the
| top button sends you straight to Download now.
| Barbing wrote:
| Zatanna
|
| Kampala (had to double check it wasn't Harris)
|
| Just mulling these names over, how'd you come up with them?
|
| PS: clear value prop!
| alexblackwell_ wrote:
| Zatanna is a DC comic book character. I'm not sure if either of
| us have even read comics, so not sure where that came from. For
| Kampala, when I started this I was trying Conductor for the
| first time. The generated workspace name was Kampala (the
| capital of Uganda). We even have a 3rd name. We actually
| incorporated as NoPoll. That one's a bit less inspiring though
| lol.
| kay_o wrote:
| Gotta ask, did you talk to legal in any way before naming
| your company after someone's IP
| ksri wrote:
| Related. We have several third party web apps in use. These apps
| don't expose a public api, but they are all single page web apps.
| We wanted to connect claude code to these web apps for our
| limited use case.
|
| We opened chrome, navigated the entire website, the downloaded
| the network tab as an har file. The asked claude to analyze and
| document the apis as an openapi json. Worked amazing.
|
| Next step - we wrote a small python script. On one side, this
| script implements stdio mcp. On the other side, it calls the
| Internal apis exposed by the 3rd party app. Only thing missing is
| the auth headers..
|
| This is the best part. When claude connects to the mcp, the mcp
| launches a playwright controlled browser and opens the target web
| apication. It detects if the user is logged in. Then it extracts
| the auth credentials using playwright, saves them to a local
| cache file and closes the browser. Then it accesses the apis
| directly - no browser needed thereafter.
|
| In about an hour worth of tokens with claude, we get a mcp server
| that works locally with each users credentials in a fairly
| reliable manner. We have been able to get this working in
| otherwise locked down corporate environments.
| namanyayg wrote:
| Smart! That's what I do as well for customers when they ask me
| to build a vibe coding layer on top of their SaaS platform.
|
| Takes very little time and tokens and I get to plug into their
| platform in seconds.
| alexblackwell_ wrote:
| Super cool. I think this is where most automation is heading .
| Would be curious if you could one-shot the auth flow using
| Kampala and completely ditch the browser. Also FWIW you can
| import HAR into Kampala and we have a few nice tools (like
| being able to a/b test payloads/replay requests) that
| meaningfully reduce integration time.
| dataviz1000 wrote:
| I built the same thing as this just for websites. [0] I'm more
| interested in using Claude recursion to tune itself -- the agent
| writes itself, the agent -- than hacking websites. It is a good
| demonstration that 47 iterations of a recursive Claude agent
| writing itself to decompose any transport.
|
| I've tested it against YouTube, Twitch, Ticketmaster, and Yahoo
| Finance. It will detect any transport like JSON, WebSocket,
| GraphQL, SSE, Protbuf, UDP, WebRTC, ect.. It after 3 hours and
| some coaching succeeded in reverse engineering ChatGPT +
| Cloudflare Turnstile but I didn't merge that into it yet.
|
| It works by Claude using the Chrome DevTools Protocol (CDP)
| intercepting all traffic.
|
| [0] https://github.com/adam-s/intercept?tab=readme-ov-
| file#how-i...
| namanyayg wrote:
| Nice ty for sharing I was going to build something like this
| for a customer.
|
| I think just downloading all network traffic and giving it to
| claude code is the fastest and cheapest approach for 99% use
| cases.
| alexblackwell_ wrote:
| We've essentially been using that "recursion" to tune our
| agent. Having the agent build itself is not something I would
| have ever thought of though. Curious if you find it genuinely
| creates specific enough tools for it to be worth the setup
| time? I have a claude skill that takes in a chat and then
| offers tools/fixes to system prompt. Have found that + the
| anthropic harness engineering blogs to be super useful in
| making the agent actually do the work.
| dataviz1000 wrote:
| Have a look at https://github.com/adam-s/agent-tuning. Now,
| I'm working on developing the evaluation, the part that
| quantifies the performance of the agent. I'm having a hard
| time explaining it. You should be able to point Opus 4.7 to
| the repository and it will know how to set it up in your
| project.
|
| You are welcome to send me an email at
| [my_username]@gmail.com if you want to talk about some of
| these things that I'm working on that are in your space.
|
| `intercept` is just a proof-of-concept and at this point, if
| it added any value to what you are working on, that would be
| the best. Overall, people are pounding every website and your
| product will save billions in compute from AI inference to
| servers grinding and grinding getting pounded by these bots.
| madradavid wrote:
| Congratulations on the launch.
|
| Totally unrelated, I am just curious about why you chose the
| name, as someone who is Ugandan and was born in raised in Kampala
| (which is the Capital City of Uganda BTW).
|
| Congratulations again.
| iconicBark wrote:
| I was caught off guard as well!!
| alexblackwell_ wrote:
| It was the (generated) name of the Conductor workspace when I
| started the project. We were going to rename it before launch
| but the name stuck lol :)
| benagents wrote:
| Great job Alex!
|
| Think this is really interesting especially for creating
| datasets. Proxyman was always hard to use for me, so connecting
| it to a MCP was something I have been waiting for.
|
| Quick question: How do you handle session re-auth mid-script?
|
| Congrats on the launch.. I need that conference script!
| alexblackwell_ wrote:
| Thanks Ben! For session re-auth we attempt to agentically find
| the session refresh/login endpoints and make those part of the
| flow as an auth provider. This can be a bit sketchy though and
| is the main bottleneck right now. Currently working on some
| cool workarounds for this that allow us to piggy back on
| browser that should land by next week :)
| benagents wrote:
| Thank you! Looking forward to it.
| lyime wrote:
| How is this different/better than charles proxy/proxyman or
| similar apps?
| alexblackwell_ wrote:
| I've probably spent on the order of months of my life in
| proxyman/charles/burp/powhttp. All are great, but I've never
| been completely satisfied with the UX/features for building
| automations. As far as differences; we don't modify TLS/HTTP2
| connections, have a fully featured MCP (each UI action is an
| api action by definition), and have built more robust
| automation tooling in the app itself. The goal is to be an AI-
| native burp suite/powhttp with Proxyman-like UI.
| telecuda wrote:
| Congrats. You may want to consider dropping the "reverse
| engineer" language though, since most every application's ToS is
| clear on that being prohibited. Perhaps just "replay any
| application" or similar.
| alexblackwell_ wrote:
| Yeah agreed this messaging is a bit confusing. Our focus is on
| helping people build automations, not do any mass-scale
| scraping.
| avaer wrote:
| Automations are also often prohibited by TOS.
| IMTDb wrote:
| Congratulations.
|
| How do you handle SSL pinning ? Most of the apps I interact with
| have some sort of SSL pinning, which is the hard part to
| circumvent. I tried Kampala but got stuck at the usual place; as
| soon as I enable it, chatGPT stops working. Most of my iPhone
| apps stop responding etc.
|
| I would love to try using this tool to build an agent that can
| simply subscribe me to my gym lessons instead of me having to go
| on the horrible app. But even that relatively simple (iOS) app
| stopped working as soon as I enabled the proxy.
| alexblackwell_ wrote:
| Unfortunately we can't do much around SSL pinning yet. Not sure
| how deep you want to go, but there are several Frida scripts
| that patch common pinning implementations.
|
| I also think mitmproxy (open source) has an option to spin up a
| virtual Android device that can bypass pinning via AVD. I have
| not tested how reliable it is though.
|
| FWIW, it could also be a cert trust issue. I would try a quick
| Safari search to confirm the cert is fully trusted. ChatGPT is
| pinned, but the gym app makes me think it might be a trust or
| config issue on your device.
|
| Happy to take a look as well. Email me at alex at zatanna dot
| ai.
| peterabbitcook wrote:
| It seems like it's quite HTTP-centric (like most of the web...).
| I didn't see anything on the page about this - can it also
| intercept / "reverse engineer" service calls that go over gRPC or
| WebSocket? I'm guessing at least a partial "yes" if the gRPC
| traffic uses grpc-web/Envoy?
|
| Seems like a great product, potentially quite powerful for
| automated testing of SPAs.
| alexblackwell_ wrote:
| Yep we handle gRPC and websocket. gRPC is a bit sketch/hard to
| do because of the way the protocol is designed. FWIW not many
| sites implement gRPC (some google sites and spotify being the
| only two I can think of), and if they do they usually have
| decent APIs. Feel free to try and lmk if you have any issues!
| 5701652400 wrote:
| so how do you parse gRPC binary? unless you have proto
| definitions, it is blackbox and is totally unsuable, isn't
| it?
| alexblackwell_ wrote:
| gRPC obscures the keys not the values. Enums and signed
| ints are sort of tricky, but the latter is just a mapping
| problem and the former can be figured out through some
| logical deduction. gRPC isn't designed to obscure request
| content, but for over the wire efficiency.
| doc_ick wrote:
| This makes me want to never create a public service again.
| alexblackwell_ wrote:
| Definitely get that. Being hammered by scrapers is a massive
| PITA (especially with latest aggressive AI crawlers). We focus
| primarily on allowing people to automate their existing
| workflows. For all hosted workflows we have rate limits to
| prevent mass scraping/affecting server workload in any real
| capacity. In fact, because we don't load js/html and hit
| endpoints directly I would guess that we consume less server
| resources in the end.
| doc_ick wrote:
| Oh no I'm not worried about the resources or rate limits.
|
| If I'd make a mobile app and users simply use your automation
| service instead of my mobile app, I'd lose
| traffic/money/motivation to improve it.
|
| If they run into issues from your service now it could make
| my app look bad while the error isn't with the app.
|
| See tailwind for an example tale.
| alexblackwell_ wrote:
| The requests still route through your servers/the data
| still lives with you. Kampala is a powerful tool but I
| don't see people replacing the actual apps with it. Most of
| our customers use it for automating repetitive actions in
| legacy dashboards.
| [deleted]
| kang wrote:
| how does this work? for eg, how is it possible to even deduce
| bitcoin structure from rpc list?
| alexblackwell_ wrote:
| sorry a bit confused on your question here. If you're asking
| about JSON RPC we handle this via parsing. The AI can then
| handle deducing structure most of the time given enough context
| ghoshbishakh wrote:
| Wireshark + some post processing?
| 5701652400 wrote:
| guess they are automating this with AI clearly with intent to
| reproduce websites on their own. clone-every app pretty much.
|
| (every app that is not hidden their networking)
| alexblackwell_ wrote:
| Yep essentially. I would argue that we're probably closer to a
| MITM proxy like Proxyman than Wireshark. We don't do general
| packet sniffing (yet), although internally we use our own
| packet sniffing tools for reverse engineering on-prem
| installations.
| 5701652400 wrote:
| guess time to move to gRPC and private encryption.
| 5701652400 wrote:
| smeels like severe breach of ToS. virtually every single website
| and app mandates not to reverse engineer and not to temper with
| inner workings (including client-server networking).
|
| side note, YC25/YC26 batches have multiple startups that blantly
| violate ToS and sitting on a timebomb just pending a lawsuite and
| Cease and Desist Letters.
| alexblackwell_ wrote:
| The goal is not to scrape sites en-masse, but to allow people
| to automate their existing workflows and actions that they
| perform already via a browser. I understand the concerns around
| this being unethical, and it's something I spent a lot of time
| thinking about when I worked on automations previously. I've
| written a decent amount about how I don't think that sneaker
| bots or ticket bots are ethical. I don't support mass scraping
| websites/making the web more inaccessible for others.
|
| I do have to push back on the ToS comments though. Automation
| is used daily by nearly all companies. RPA is a billion dollar
| industry. Browserbase raised at 300M valuation. Is using
| puppeteer to automate a form submission a violation of ToS? If
| so then why is using a screen reader not? Is it the intention?
| Why is hitting network requests directly different? I
| personally don't think that automation is unethical (as long as
| it is not affecting server capacity). I don't think the answer
| to the ethical problems in scraping is just not to automate at
| all. Open to disagreement here though.
| teraflop wrote:
| > Is using puppeteer to automate a form submission a
| violation of ToS? If so then why is using a screen reader
| not?
|
| Without taking a position on the ethics of automation, surely
| this isn't a serious question? Things that the ToS prohibits
| you from doing are ToS violations, and other things aren't.
|
| For instance, from AirBnb's terms of service: "Do not use
| bots, crawlers, scrapers, or other automated means to access
| or collect data or other content from or otherwise interact
| with the Airbnb Platform."
|
| There is no similar prohibition against using screen readers.
| alexblackwell_ wrote:
| My broader point is that these ToS clauses are often so
| broad and vague that they're essentially unenforceable and
| not meaningful in practice. For example, "Do not use bots"
| covers a pretty substantial amount of ground, and intention
| isn't exactly something you can screen for. Is an autofill
| chrome extension a bot? If so what separates that autofill
| from accessibility extensions? Is someone using Whispr flow
| to fill forms considered a bot? AirBNB doesn't block
| Google's crawler. Why? A company can enforce its TOS as it
| wishes. My general point is that the waters are murky, and
| that automation is a sort of sliding scale.
| ImPostingOnHN wrote:
| _> For instance, from AirBnb 's terms of service: "Do not
| use bots, crawlers, scrapers, or other automated means to
| access or collect data or other content from or otherwise
| interact with the Airbnb Platform."_
|
| _> There is no similar prohibition against using screen
| readers._
|
| A screen reader uses automated means to access or collect
| data or other content from or otherwise interact with a
| platform.
| janalsncm wrote:
| Under that ToS would a screen reader not be considered
| "other automated means" of "interacting with" the platform?
| It is automatically walking an accessibility tree.
| jasonlotito wrote:
| Wait till these sites discover web browsers and developer
| tools.
| 5701652400 wrote:
| so if API is published, there is nothing to reverse engineer.
|
| and if API is not published, and you MITM with self-compromised
| CAs, and then use it (commercially?) you ~100% breaking ToS.
|
| this is just un-ethical. or YC does not have regard anymore for
| such things?
| rrr_oh_man wrote:
| > anymore
|
| Ehh...
| alexblackwell_ wrote:
| Noticed you have two comments here. I think my response to your
| other comment best answers this
| (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47798259). Definitely
| open to discussing this more here. Not sure if I agree on the
| self-compromised CA bit. MITM proxies have been used for 20+
| years for debugging. In fact, I use Kampala to debug our
| personal APIs/web app all of the time.
| jasonlotito wrote:
| > this is just un-ethical.
|
| There is nothing unethical about this. You can technically do
| this with a browser and its dev tools.
|
| You being here is far more unethical than this app.
| ImPostingOnHN wrote:
| Some people may believe in equal measure that intentionally
| trying to break interoperability is unethical. Especially if
| it's _my_ data.
| bbg2401 wrote:
| > Because Kampala is a MITM, it is able to leverage existing
| session tokens/anti-bot cookies and automate things
| deterministically in seconds
|
| If a web property has implemented anti-bot mechanisms, what
| ethical reasons do you have for providing evasion as a service?
| alexblackwell_ wrote:
| I wouldn't consider what we do evasion really. We are using
| real tokens that you have received from your browser as a
| result of browsing the web. Any good anti-bot will have
| enforcement for abuses of that token.
| bbg2401 wrote:
| But as mentioned by another reader, that would almost
| certainly violate the ToS of the web property subject to the
| automation. It's almost indistinguishable from session
| hijacking as far as that property is concerned. And it
| certainly isn't intended usage.
|
| Indeed, it would likely be classed as a violation according
| to your own ToS.
|
| It's a delicate matter as we all deploy personal automations
| that break ToS without us really giving it a second thought.
| But as a commercial endeavour, it feels brazen, I'm sorry to
| say.
| aleksiy123 wrote:
| Prety cool, are you able to output a openapi or similar spec?
|
| I tried my hand at this once from har file, build a DAG of the
| requests and responses and how their parameters map into each
| other, and then try to build a spec.
|
| But it was very brittle. I imagine now with LLMs its much more
| viable. I always thought generating clients and load tests would
| be a cool use case.
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