Hi HN, I built webctl because I was frustrated by the gap between curl and full browser automation frameworks like Playwright.

I initially built this to solve a personal headache: I wanted an AI agent to handle project management tasks on my company’s intranet. I needed it to persist cookies across sessions (to handle SSO) and then scrape a Kanban board.

Existing AI browser tools (like current MCP implementations) often force unsolicited data into the context window—dumping the full accessibility tree, console logs, and network errors whether you asked for them or not.

webctl is an attempt to solve this with a Unix-style CLI:

- Filter before context: You pipe the output to standard tools. webctl snapshot --interactive-only | head -n 20 means the LLM only sees exactly what I want it to see.

- Daemon Architecture: It runs a persistent background process. The goal is to keep the browser state (cookies/session) alive while you run discrete, stateless CLI commands.

- Semantic targeting: It uses ARIA roles (e.g., role=button name~="Submit") rather than fragile CSS selectors.

Disclaimer: The daemon logic for state persistence is still a bit experimental, but the architecture feels like the right direction for building local, token-efficient agents.

It’s basically "Playwright for the terminal."

At this point I'm fully down the path of the agent just maintaining his own tools. I have a browser skill that continues to evolve as I use it. Beats every alternative I have tried so far.

Creator of Browser Use here, this is cool, really innovative approach with ARIA roles. One idea we have been playing around with a lot is just giving the LLM raw html and a really good way to traverse it - no heuristics, just BS4. Seems to work well, but much more expensive than the current prod ready [index]<div ... notation

Cool to see lots of people independently come to "CLIs are all you need". I'm still not sure if it's a short-term bandaid because agents are so good at terminal use or if it's part of a longer term trend but it's definitely felt much more seamless to me then MCPs.

(my one of many contribution https://github.com/caesarnine/binsmith)

If you look at Elixir keynote for Phoenix.new -- a cool agentic coding tool -- you'll see some hints about a browser control using a API tool call. It's called "web" in the video.

Video: https://youtu.be/ojL_VHc4gLk?t=2132

More discussion: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Jun/23/phoenix-new/

A little bit different, but also allows to scrape efficiently. Json http communication rather than cli.

https://github.com/rumca-js/crawler-buddy

More like a framework for other mechanisms

This looks remarkably similar to https://github.com/vercel-labs/agent-browser

How is it different?

is there a benchmark? there are a lot of scraping agents nowdays..

How are you holding session if every command is issues through cli? I assume this is essential for automation.