Show HN: We're building a desktop app for browser agents
25 comments
·February 1, 2025sky2224
Interesting idea. With the web scraping utility, do I need to specify which websites I wish for the api to scrape from or do I essentially just say, "hey I want this data, go get it"?
If it's the latter, how do you go about making sure you're not about to download malicious data to my machine?
jawerty
Great question, so right now you can do both. It does work better if you simply enter in the url for your task.
For the url generation we do we have safety checks for the urls however it's simply in the prompting. I would love to hear what sort of safety suggestions you have and/or concerns about this sort of experience. Right now we're still figuring out how best to enable people to utilize agents safely.
anticorporate
The headline needs another word. Maybe browser-based agents. I assumed this was about browser user-agents.
jawerty
maybe browser AI agent? Good note we didn't think of that.
iiJDSii
Very cool! Any video demos for sample tasks? I didn't come across any on the website (browsing on mobile).
artabra
Those are still in the cooker, we'll throw them up asap once they're ready.
Some demos we will have are:
- Logging into twitter and tweeting
- Finding information from google maps of any nearby business whether that's for leads or finding local restaurant options.
- Scraping anything from wikipedia like current events etc.
- And more!
iiJDSii
Those are good ones. I've fiddled with similar systems before, do you have a rough success rate? I know they can be finicky, especially as you execute through a chain-of-thought action plan, or however you're doing it.
artabra
Hi everyone, this is Art!
Happy to hear all the thoughts for those who try the app out! Even if you just have ideas about how agents might look in their final form, there's so many avenue's this tech can take and we have a ton of wild ideas we'll be building so stay tuned. :D
noahfk
it kept taking me to non existent websites that were a summary of what i asked it for
jawerty
Thanks for letting us know can you email us at info@meha.ai or dm one of us on discord with more information we're working through all the bug reports in the next couple days.
jawerty
Hi HN! This is Jared co-founder at Meha (and our dev). Let me know what you think! I'll be here to respond to any feedback as you guys try it out.
delduca
Is it a native app or electron based?
jawerty
This is a python QT app (for now) we're lookin to move to electron however packaging this has been...interesting.
delduca
Please stick with Qt, I have ditched all non native and electron apps from my machine (the last replacement was VSCode to Zed)
jawerty
Interesting can you lmk why you ditched all non native? We're discussing what decision to make on this now.
cpursley
Please please please don’t move to electron and just build something native. Electron desktop software bloat is killing our machines.
jawerty
Packaging a browser runtime for a chat app is a concern when the base amount of resources is far more than what we need. I'm more concerned about dev community + what runtime we'd prefer managing local browser in. I'm looking to Go frameworks right now (I'm naturally moving away from python to Go personally) if anyone has any suggestions
dgfitz
I would be so happy if the migration went from pyqt to c++ qt.
Hell, I’ll help with the conversion.
jwrallie
So the reason for no Linux support is non technical right? There are literally dozens of us!
An easy way to scrape webpages is something I’m interested in, I promise I’ll try it when it’s supported.
jawerty
Oh please join the discord or email us to request linux support trying to log all the feedback. It's really just time limitations right now no prejudice :)
benatkin
> Please give us all the feedback/criticism (even if you hate AI)
It seems you might be in the habit of discrediting people who have valid concerns about AI by simply suggesting they hate it. Either that, or it was random of you to mention a vanishingly small group of people who simply "hate" AI for no reason.
jawerty
It's all good! We're were mostly joking there I'm sure you have valid criticisms.
benatkin
Oh so I read right, indeed you scoff at risks from AI.
fosterfriends
Feels like you're being pretty negative to some kind folks showing off a cool thing they built.
HN is a place for people to show and tell with positive intention and constructive feedback. I don't think OP is scoffing at all :)
null
What's up HN!
This is Jared and Art. We met on HN and started building together.
Over the last few months we've been thinking a lot about how AI agents are going to impact the future. We want agents to be something that's actually useful for normal people as well as the 10x'ers. This lead us to building Meha over the last few months, our first swing at our vision! We saw OpenAI release Operators then we said f*k it let's post.
Meha is a desktop app that uses your Chrome browser to execute tasks in the background. It controls your installed Chrome browser and uses LLMs with playwright to plan and execute actions to accomplish your task. You get to see each planning step the bot is doing and have access to its long term memory.
Meha also uses its own file system and can export files for download. Another thing we've been focused on in multi-agent workflows and Meha can run many bots at the same time. One of the reasons why we can ship this for free in the mean time is because of how cheap the agents are. But we are planning to have a Pro version for power users. We prefer not to raise since we're against VC funding.
We have been influenced by a lot of concepts in probabilistic robotics and RL to develop a fairly robust 'agentic' framework. As well as an algorithm for efficiently converting/compressing large html pages into a semantic format. If you're interested we will open source this asap in an SDK (will work with all OpenAI API spec LLMs and with llama.cpp) let us know.
We're currently in beta and working on figuring out what this product will become and super stoked! Let us know what you think. To get access to Meha we have links on our discord to download (Both MacOS and Windows is available). Please give us all the feedback/criticism (even if you hate AI).
Link to Meha: https://meha.ai