Show HN: Workflow Use – Deterministic, self-healing browser automation (RPA 2.0)
(github.com)67 points by gregpr07 2 days ago
Hey HN – Gregor & Magnus here again.
A few months ago, we launched Browser Use (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43173378), which let LLMs perform tasks in the browser using natural language prompts. It was great for one-off tasks like booking flights or finding products—but we soon realized enterprises have somewhat different needs:
They typically have one workflow with dynamic variables (e.g., filling out a form and downloading a PDF) that they want to reliably run a million times without breaking. Pure LLM agents were slow, expensive, and unpredictable for these high-frequency tasks.
So we just started working on Workflow Use:
- You show the browser what to do (by manually recording steps; show don’t tell).
- An LLM converts these recordings into deterministic scripts with variables (scripts include AI steps as well, where it’s 100% agentic)
- Scripts run reliably, 10x faster, and ~90% cheaper than Browser Use.
- If a step breaks, workflow will fallback to Browser Use and agentically run the step. (This self-healing functionality is still very early.)
This project just kicked off, so lots of things will break, it’s definitely not production-ready yet, and plenty of stuff is still missing (like a solid editor and proper self-healing). But we wanted to share early, get feedback, and figure out what workflows you’d want to automate this way.
Try it out and let us know what you think!
I love the use of reusable non-LLM code for the "happy path" and only using the LLM to create a workflow or repair it.
One area for improve seems to be the checkboxes/radio buttons (possibility other input types?) given the demo didn't pick up on that (it did make the same selections but it didn't recognize this was a multiple-choice input). It might be useful to have a step before creating the JSON where it asks the user some follow up questions like, "Here are the inputs I found and my understanding of their data type". And then go through each input asking for a default value and maybe even clarification on "Should we even prompt for this?" (Example, always select country X).
I wonder if, for workflow repair purposes, it would be helpful to, at recording time, save more contextual information about the fields you are filling/clicking on. "This a country selector", "This is the birthdate field", etc. So that if the xpath/css/etc fails you can give the LLM doing the repair work a description of what it's looking for.
I'm excited to see more efforts in QA testing with things like this. Brittle e2e tests are the bane of my (limited) automated experience and the ability to auto-heal and/or deal with minor deviations would be wonderful.