Show HN: PageAgent, A GUI agent that lives inside your web app
62 points - today at 5:01 PM
Title: Show HN: PageAgent, A GUI agent that lives inside your web app
Hi HN,
I'm building PageAgent, an open-source (MIT) library that embeds an AI agent directly into your frontend.
I built this because I believe there's a massive design space for deploying general agents natively inside the web apps we already use, rather than treating the web merely as a dumb target for isolated bots.
Currently, most AI agents operate from external clients or server-side programs, effectively leaving web development out of the AI ecosystem. I'm experimenting with an "inside-out" paradigm instead. By dropping the library into a page, you get a client-side agent that interacts natively with the live DOM tree and inherits the user's active session out of the box, which works perfectly for SPAs.
To handle cross-page tasks, I built an optional browser extension that acts as a "bridge". This allows the web-page agent to control the entire browser with explicit user authorization. Instead of a desktop app controlling your browser, your web app is empowered to act as a general agent that can navigate the broader web.
I'd love to start a conversation about the viability of this architecture, and what you all think about the future of in-app general agents. Happy to answer any questions!
Comments
- GitHub: https://github.com/alibaba/page-agent
- Live Demo (No sign-up): https://alibaba.github.io/page-agent/ (you can drag the bookmarklet from here to try it on other sites)
- Browser Extension: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/page-agent-ext/akld...
I'd be really interested in feedback on the security model of client-side agents giving extension-bridge access, and taking questions on the implementation!
We just launched Rover (https://rover.rtrvr.ai/) as the first Embeddable Web Agent.
Similar principles, just embed a script tag and you get an agent that can type/click/select to onboard/demo/checkout users.
I tried on your website and it was reeaaaally slow. Quick question:
- you are injecting numbering on to the UI. Are you taking screenshots? But I don't see any screenshots in the request being sent, what is the point of the numbering?
I don't think building on browser-use is the way to go, it was the worst performing harness of all we tested [https://www.rtrvr.ai/blog/web-bench-results]. We built out our own logic to build custom Action Trees that don't require any ARIA or accessibility setup from websites.
Would love to meet and trade notes, if possible (rtrvr.ai/request-demo)!
Appreciate the transparency, but maybe you could add some European (preferably) alternatives ?
The only thing I can think of is you had the AI rewrite and embed selectors on the entire build file and work with that?
I'm particularly impressed by the bookmark "trick" to install it on a page. Despite having spent 15 years developing for the browser, I had somehow missed that feature of the bookmarks bar. But awesome UX for people to try out the tool. Congrats!
> Collect and query content from tabs, bookmarks, and history - your AI research companion. FolioLM helps you collect sources from tabs, bookmarks, and history, then query and transform that content using AI.
https://github.com/PaulKinlan/NotebookLM-Chrome https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/foliolm/eeejhgacmlh...