Show HN: Spegel, a Terminal Browser That Uses LLMs to Rewrite Webpages
120 comments
·July 1, 2025qsort
TeMPOraL
> tab 1 contains news outlet A's coverage of a story, tab 2 has outlet B's coverage, tab 3 has Wikipedia; summarize and provide references.
I think this is basically what https://ground.news/ does.
(I'm not affiliated with them; just saw them in the sponsorship section of a Kurzgesagt video the other day and figured they're doing the thing you described +/- UI differences.)
simedw
Thank you.
I was thinking of showing multiple tabs/views at the same time, but only from the same source.
Maybe we could have one tab with the original content optimised for cli viewing, and another tab just doing fact checking (can ground it with google search or brave). Would be a fun experiment.
nextaccountic
In your cleanup step, after cleaning obvious junk, I think you should do whatever Firefox's reader mode does to further clean up, and if that fails bail out to the current output. That should reduce the number of tokens you send to the LLM even more
You should also have some way for the LLM to indicate there is no useful output because perhaps the page is supposed to be a SPA. This would force you to execute Javascript to render that particular page though
simedw
Just had a look and three is quite a lot going into Firefox's reader mode.
myfonj
Interestingly, the original idea of what we call a "browser" nowadays – the "user agent" – was built on the premise that each user has specific needs and preferences. The user agent was designed to act on their behalf, negotiating data transfers and resolving conflicts between content author and user (content consumer) preferences according to "strengths" and various reconciliation mechanisms.
(The fact that browsers nowadays are usually expected to represent something "pixel-perfect" to everyone with similar devices is utterly against the original intention.)
Yet the original idea was (due to the state of technical possibilities) primarily about design and interactivity. The fact that we now have tools to extend this concept to core language and content processing is… huge.
It seems we're approaching the moment when our individual personal agent, when asked about a new page, will tell us:
Well, there's nothing new of interest for you, frankly:
All information presented there was present on pages visited recently.
-- or --
You've already learned everything mentioned there. (*)
Here's a brief summary: …
(Do you want to dig deeper, see the content verbatim, or anything else?)
bee_rider
It would have to have a pretty good model of my brain to help me make these decisions. Just as a random example, it will have to understand that an equation is a sort of thing that I’m likely to look up even if I understand the meaning of it, just to double check and get the particulars right. That’s an obvious example, I think there must be other examples that are less obvious.
Or that I’m looking up a data point that I already actually know, just because I want to provide a citation.
But, it could be interesting.
ffsm8
> Well, there's nothing new of interest for you, frankly
For this to work like a user would want, the model would have to be sentient.
But you could try to get there with current models, it'd just be very untrustworthy to the point of being pointless beyond a novelty
wrsh07
Would really love to see more functionality built into this. Handling post requests, enabling scripting, etc could all be super powerful
baq
wonder if you can work on the DOM instead of HTML...
almost unrelated, but you can also compare spegel to https://www.brow.sh/
andrepd
LLMs to generate SEO slop of the most utterly piss-poor quality, then another LLM to lossilly "summarise" it back. Brave new world?
Buttons840
A step towards the future of ad-blocking maybe? Just rewrite every page?
conradkay
Something tells me we'll see more ad-inserting
bubblyworld
Classic that the first example is for parsing the goddamn recipe from the goddamn recipe site. Instant thumbs up from me haha, looks like a neat little project.
andrepd
Which it apparently does by completely changing the recipe in random places including ingredients and amounts thereof. It is _indeed_ a very good microcosm of what LLMs are, just not in the way these comments think.
simedw
It was actually a bit worse than that the LLM never got the full recipe due to some truncation logic I had added. So it regurgitated the recipe from training, and apparently, it couldn't do both that and convert units at the same time with the lite model (it worked for just flash).
I should have caught that, and there are probably other bugs too waiting to be found. That said, it's still a great recipe.
andrepd
You're missing the point, but okay.
bubblyworld
What do you mean? The recipes in the screenshot look more or less the same, the formatting has just changed in the Spiegel one (which is what was asked for, so no surprises there).
Edit: just saw the author's comment, I think I'm looking at the fixed page
throwawayoldie
The output was then posted to the Internet for everyone to see, without the minimal amount of proofreading that would be necessary to catch that, which gives us a good microcosm of how LLMs are used.
On a more pleasant topic the original recipe sounds delicious, I may give it a try when the weather cools off a little.
IncreasePosts
There are extensions that do that for you, in a deterministic way and not relying on LLMs. For example, Recipe Filter for chrome. It just shows a pop up over the page when it loads if it detects a recipe
bubblyworld
Thanks, I already use that plugin, actually, I just found the problem amusingly familiar. Recipe sites are the original AI slop =P
mromanuk
I definitely like the LLM in the middle, it’s a nice way to circumvent the SEO machine and how Google has optimized writing in recent years. Removing all the cruft from a recipe is a brilliant case for an LLM. And I suspect more of this is coming: LLMs to filter. I mean, it would be nice to just read the recipe from HTML, but SEO has turned everything into an arms race.
visarga
I foreseen this a couple years ago. We already have web search tools in LLMs, and they are amazing when they chain multiple searches. But Spegel is a completely different take.
I think the ad blocker of the future will be a local LLM, small and efficient. Want to sort your timeline chronologically? Or want a different UI? Want some things removed, and others promoted? Hide low quality comments in a thread? All are possible with LLM in the middle, in either agent or proxy mode.
I bet this will be unpleasant for advertisers.
hirako2000
Do you also like what it costs you to browse the web via an LLM potentially swallowing millions of tokens per minutes ?
prophesi
This seems like a suitable job for a small language model. Bit biased since I just read this paper[0]
yellow_lead
LLM adds cruft, LLM removes cruft, never a miscommunication
treyd
I wonder if you could use a less sophisticated model (maybe even something based on LSTMs) to walk over the DOM and extract just the chunks that should be emitted and collected into the browsable data structure, but doing it all locally. I feel like it'd be straightforward to generate training data for this, using an LLM-based toolchain like what the author wrote to be used directly.
askonomm
Unfortunately in the modern web simply walking the DOM doesn't cut it if the website's content loads in with JS. You could only walk the DOM once the JS has loaded, and all the requests it makes have finished, and at that point you're already using a whole browser renderer anyway.
__MatrixMan__
It would be cool of it were smart enough to figure out whether it was necessary to rewrite the page on every visit. There's a large chunk of the web where one of us could visit once, rewrite to markdown, and then serve the cleaned up version to each other without requiring a distinct rebuild on each visit.
markstos
Cache headers exist for servers to communicate to clients how long it safe to cache things for. The client could be updated to add a cache layer that respects cache headers.
myfonj
Each user have distinct needs, and has a distinct prior knowledge about the topic, so even the "raw" super clean source form will probably be eventually adjusted differently for most users.
But yes, having some global shared redundant P2P cache (of the "raw" data), like IPFS (?) could possibly help and save some processing power and help with availability and data preservation.
simedw
If the goal is to have a more consistent layout on each visit, I think we could save the last page's markdown and send it to the model as a one-shot example...
pmxi
The author says this is for “personalized views using your own prompts.” Though, I suppose it’s still useful to cache the outputs for the default prompt.
__MatrixMan__
Or to cache the output for whatever prompt your peers think is most appropriate for that particular site.
kelsey98765431
People here are not realizing that html is just the start. If you can render a webpage into a view, you can render any input the model accepts. PDF to this view. Zip file of images to this view. Giant json file into this view. Whatever. The view is the product here, not the html input.
hyperific
Why not use pandoc to convert html to markdown and have the LLM condense from there?
clbrmbr
Suggestion: add a -p option:
spegel -p "extract only the product reviews" > REVIEWS.mdohadron
This is a terrific idea and could also have a lot of value with regards to accessibility.
cheevly
Very cool! My retired AI agent transformed live webpage content, here's an old video clip of transforming HN to My Little Pony (with some annoying sounds): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1_j6cYeByOU. Skip to ~37 seconds for the outcome. I made an open-source standalone Chrome extension as well, it should probably still work for anyone curious: https://github.com/joshgriffith/ChromeGPT
benrutter
Welcome to 2025 where it's more reasonable to filter all content through an LLM than to expect web developers to make use of the semantic web that's existed for more than a decade. . .
Serioisly though, looks like a novel fix for the problem that most terminal browsers face. Namely that terminals are text based, but the web, whilst it contains text, is often subdivided up in a way that only really makes sense graphically.
I wonder if a similar type of thing might work for screen readers or other accessibility features
This is actually very cool. Not really replacing a browser, but it could enable an alternative way of browsing the web with a combination of deterministic search and prompts. It would probably work even better as a command line tool.
A natural next step could be doing things with multiple "tabs" at once, e.g: tab 1 contains news outlet A's coverage of a story, tab 2 has outlet B's coverage, tab 3 has Wikipedia; summarize and provide references. I guess the problem at that point is whether the underlying model can support this type of workflow, which doesn't really seem to be the case even with SOTA models.