We have a few of these browser agent products now - Perplexity Comet and Brave Leo and Claude for Chrome have been around for a few months now Anyone finding value in them? What have you used them for that genuinely saved you time?
@alexlbuild Honestly I'm not newly enough of an Excel power user to have a useful opinion! They make sense to me as a category, given that sophisticated Excel usage is a programming activity and LLMs are great at writing code
@simonw "Summarise this YouTube video" is the "Alexa, set a timer" of the AI age
@simonw Tried most of them — they’re great for summarizing, but still surface-level. The real time-saver comes when the agent understands context across tabs instead of single pages. That’s when it starts feeling like intelligence, not automation.
@simonw The value will be when agent mode and the ability to operate the web browser is 10x faster. Simple things like filling out forms or Jira tickets are useful. But it’s just too slow with its agentic feature. No snippets or saved prompts makes it not so powerful.
@simonw As long as these companies crow about how their models will report anything they hallucinate as dangerous to police, I cannot fathom how anybody would ever risk using a nanny company AI in their browser. My gf laughed when I told her that OpenAI released a browser when they're
@simonw Zero value. I did fork chromium and made a version of it using self hosted Qwen. Cant trust these third party browsers.
@simonw I use it to summarize the post/video/article. Pretty much by biggest use case. From time to time, I also ask questions on some of the points/topics covered in the post/video. Helps that I dont have to move out of the tab (focused context switching!) Haven't found any of the
@simonw I’m literally using ChatGPT Atlas agent mode right here on X. It’s like having a nerdy AI co pilot that can open tabs, summarize articles and even help draft this reply. It saves me loads of time by skimming long threads and hunting down info quickly. Plus it’s way more fun than
@simonw I kind of want them to be able to somehow edit the don and customize the UI to enable feature not just chat and computer use. Actual augment my experience. Like AI tampermonkey on the fly
@simonw Been using @diabrowser, quite similar to Atlas less the shopping. Saves tab switching effort to LLM app, passing context is easy, plus skills are useful to reuse prompts.
@simonw one unsolved problem with browser agents in general is running in to SMS verification. Agent gets 90% of the way to task completion and then runs into this brick wall
@simonw I built a bunch of AI shopping assistants recently. It's usually some form of chat embedded in the website. Some thoughts I had while designing those experiences: - what if users don't trust the brand's assistant? What if they trust their chatgpt more? - what if the brand's
@simonw I have use it to generate datadog dashboards and search through API docs
@simonw Same! The browser-use context retrieval always fails for me. For example, I would love to archive all the LinkedIn DM spam, but the agent tries to search for keywords. You almost need something that reads every incoming snippet of data & sets up a semantic index before these
@simonw Using it like Grammarly is by far my favorite use case. I know it sounds odd, but it has more flair than Grammarly — the prompt just works beautifully.
@simonw yes, Dia has been great to UX for creative/technical writing and research IMO. Reference multiple tabs + selected text for context + prompt. Chat with the tab, run user made skills/tools. I really like the experience so far.
@simonw Exp using perplexity comet, - Asking question when inside github repo, e.g deps, logic, how it is developed. - Finding info from Lib docs page. Helpful where cmd + k is not granular. - Youtube video, asking question, finding exact timeframe where transcript is not present. -
@simonw Brave Leo and similar Chrome extensions are not agents. I tried Comet but it took more time that I can click myself and it is practically useless without the paid plan. The most common use case for me is to just summarize an article I am reading.
@simonw I have some use cases lined up, but they just aren't up to snuff yet, still waiting for the Claude Code moment in this space https://x.com/edgarsnemse/stat...
@simonw I launched a browser agent ~1 year ago and the main thing I think they sell is the illusion of using ai in your everyday job. For programmers we are lucky, coding agents work remarkably well and the medium is plain text which is exactly what llms are good at outputting. Browser
@simonw I don’t want to save time. I want to save money and waste time being inefficient.
@simonw I don’t use regular browsers without AI now (bar sensitive work and financial sites). It’s a much easier way to browse through news subscriptions, work with academic papers and learn. Having a back and forth while reading a document is v valuable for learning / fact checking
@simonw The best use-cases so far
@simonw Brave’s Leo is great for summarizing search results to answer my 8 year old’s incessant questions about Pokemon.
@simonw Claude for Chrome is amazing! It can process email, review and even write docs, you can have it use “scratch space” for recurrent tasks. My metaphor for it: “It’s like Claude Code for the browser” (And safer, if slower, than perplexity comet)
@simonw Other day, tried adding GSAP widget in WP. Previously, copy-pasted back & forth to see changes. Used Comet w/ Perplexity Asst.—it figured it all out. Super cool! Haven't found other crazy useful Comet use cases yet. Also I think using a browser with vision support bypasses the
@simonw I think they're a cool idea, but I think they are just a middleman between today and eventually just talking to your digital assistant and having it do it all for you. https://x.com/DanielMiessler/s...
@simonw I had comet set up a firebase db the other day… saved me like a half hour. Now that I know it does that kind of thing I’ll figure out more uses in that vein.
@simonw 2 things i use comet for: A. i was too lazy finding the youtube video portion where some event happened, i can just ask comet assistant to find that for me. 2. for creating timelines from research papers where authors talk about previous work that led up to this paper. for other
@simonw When I'm studying and have questions about what I'm reading I ask Comet assistant to explain it to me. It does save me some time because I do not have to leave the document
@simonw I've used Comet a bit to do problem research / discovery on Reddit which isn't possible in the Web version. Scoped to site and browser control to search.
@simonw I build web automation (hand-coded selenium) for businesses. I used Claude for chrome a few times to help parse the pages. Never worked it enough into my process for it to be especially useful. It needed more prompting and guidance to get it right, so I just went back to doing