The Wisdom Wall

“Maybe my, my hot take is like, I was always kind of like, I didn't think vision would be as big of a driver for UI automation. I, I felt like, you know, HTML is structured text and large language models are good with structured texts, but It's clear that these computer use models are often vision driven and, um,…”

“And unfortunately it just, it's a great product, but I think if you're an infrastructure company, you actually have to have a deeper level of control over these primitives. I think it's the same thing is true with databases.”

“I think that using mouse click or mouse coordinates, I've seen that proved to be less reliable than I would like. And I just wonder if that's the right form factor. What we've done with our framework is Anchor it to the DOM itself. Anchor it to the actual item. So like if it's clicking on something, it's clicking on…”

“for tools and primitives with sufficient levels of complexity, you need to have a solution that's really bespoke to that primitive, you know, and, and I am sufficiently convinced that the browser is complex enough to deserve a primitive.”

“If you want to move extremely fast as a company, one of the hard parts about having co-founders is that there's like, you have to do the, the co-founder alignment and then the company alignment. And then there's people on the team that probably tell things to one co-founder because they have a favorite. And then like…”

“when you make people make a polarizing decision of like, I will come to an office five days a week, people then end up making more decisions that are aligned with the culture. So it's almost like if you can make your culture binary or you're in or out, It becomes easier to assimilate and like keep a cohesive culture.…”

“So if you want to run a web browser or thousands of web browsers, you can't just spin up a bunch of Lambdas. You actually need to use a secure containerized environment. You have to scale it up and down. It's a stateful system.”

“I, I highly recommend for developer tools founders to work with consumer agencies because they end up building beautiful things and the Parisians know how to build beautiful interfaces.”

“as a developer, you think you evaluate a company based on like the API reliability and the P-ninety-five, but a lot of developers say, is the website good? Is the message clear? Do I like trust this founder I'm building my whole feature on?”

“Those are some of the worst systems to run because when it's a stateful distributed system, it means that you are bound by the connections to that thing. You have to keep the browser open while someone is working with it, right? That's just a painful architecture to run.”

“Web agents need human the loop type workflows still. You still need a person to interact with a browser and building a UI to proxy that is kind of hard. You may as well just show them the whole browser and say, Hey, can you finish this up for me? And then let the AI proceed on afterwards.”

“If you're building applications that rely on a browser and it's more part of a greater like AI app experience, you probably need something that's more like infrastructure, not a consumer app.”

“Stagehand isn't a web agent. It's a framework for building web agents. And we think that agent loops are actually pretty close to the application layer because every application probably has different goals or different ways it wants to take steps.”

“if you're building a scraping company, StageChan's not your thing. You probably want something that's gonna, like, get HTML content, you know, convert that to Markdown, query it. That's not what StageChan does. StageChan's more, more about reliability.”

“if you're building web scraping workflows, what you should do is have a waterfall. You should have the first request is a curl to the website. See if you can get it without even using a browser. And then the second request may be like a scraping specific API. There's like a thousand scraping APIs out there that you can…”

“The future of software is software using software.”

“Culturally, we're a lot of like former YCCTOs and like ex-founders or future founders. And I've just found that those people tend to be just really great early hires for a company. They, they get it.”

“there's so much money to be made in taking like proprietary research and then turning that into like an automation, which is obviously like a very like browser based inspired one, like listening to all of the city halls or town hall meetings in like little towns, and then knowing when they're going to like approve a…”