Launch HN: Intuned (YC S22) – Build and run reliable browser automations as code

thanks for the idea!

Hi Bronco, Omar here, a Lead Platform Engineer at Intuned.

> I've tried adding browser automation outside of the single click from the extension, and I'm immediately met with bot detection.

Can you explain how you write your automation? How do you do the click from the extension? Do you use CDP input commands to perform the click (`Input.dispatchMouseEvent`), or do you execute JS code and click the button using `element.click`? using CDP will give you much better score than Executing JS to click a captcha button. JS Execution can be easily detected by any bot detection provider. On the other hand, using CDP to click can mimic actual mouse movement and will make it much harder to detect abnormalities. and the click event will have `isTrusted=true` and handle detection methods related to monitoring JS executions on page.

> Do modified browsers drive the overall bot detection heuristic low enough that the cloud IP address itself isn't a red flag? I've seen Camoufox and will try it at some point. What other options are available to drive down the overall "score" so I can still automate the browser but keep the latency low?

Modified browsers reduce your bot score a lot, and Camoufox is a great option to test out. Will it work? It depends on how the website has set up their bot detection. using modified browser is a must for use case.

At Intuned, we use our own internal forked Chrome to hide the most popular signals, and a lot of the time, the browser alone without a residential proxy can help us bypass most websites, but not all of them(IP reputation has very high heuristic value).

I can't give exact recommendation on what will work with you for sure since each website has it's own ways to handle bot detection , one recommendation I can give is to try to use packages like patchright they can help alot and hide alot of popular signals.

Another recommendation I can make is to try using intuned agent and ask it to help you find a way to bypass bot detection on that website. If you can handle it using network interception or some other scraping technique, the agent is really good in these cases and knows most of the used scraping techniques.

Use the real browser: clawchrome.com. You can evaluate code on the page, do network capture, screenshot. But it’s the real browser, no fork, no cdp.

For lower RTT you’ll need an instance and proxy close to upstream but a real browser will help with scraping detection.

thanks! i asked my teammate working on bot detection to respond, he can better answer this!

Great question - we tried so many things and overtime, we ended up doing 2 things - custom chromium build and extension to solve captchas. In our docs, checkout stealth mode - https://intunedhq.com/docs/main/02-features/stealth-mode-cap...

Also, one of our engineers did a write up on bot detection systems and how they work - https://intunedhq.com/blog/how-bot-detection-works

I had this problem with https://gitlab.com/gabriel.chamon/yagi which is Yet Another Stalker Gamma Installer. In my region, Brazil, I get cloudflare captchas when downloading assets from moddb. Using a VPN solves this but then latency and speed goes out the window. What worked for this particular case was to use an unmodified Firefox build and interact with it indirectly with it's limited interface: launch the browser with the download URL, solve captcha once, have the automation look for the download start at the browser's sqlite db then wait for the download to finish looking at the filesystem. Anything, even marionette would trigger cloudflares anti automation, even if I was solving the captcha manually.

We actually went through 1 hard pivot only, the reset is more about framing the problem as we dug deeper and understood the customers and issue more. As an example, "Intuned Auth Sessions" is just a feature that we still support today! But you are right, being a founder is not easy and the hardest part is figuring out what to build, does it make sense to keep going or should you stop - those are questions I still struggle with until today.

For your question about how is this different - I think if you dig into those product you will see that our focus is different, many of the companies mentioned are focused on powering agents via APIs, some are focused on enabling users to use AI at runtime, we do feel that our product is somewhat differentiated - the closest one is possibly Reworkd and I would still say the product is somewhat different. Now, the hardest part is actually commenting this with customers and the market in general - and there, we have a lot to figure out!

For robots.txt and user-agents question, we think of ourselves as providing infrastructure and flexibility for our customers to do what they want - we do encourage in our docs that they respect robots.txt but we don't enforce it on a platform level.

Appreciate you taking the time to leave this comment - very thoughtful

thanks for the kind words! We have been seeing this pattern of customers wanting full service since we launch. Let's see how it goes!

Salam, very interesting. curious why abstracting the code? For us, exposing code gives the user way more control and visibility about what's happening with their automations.

Hi Arjun, our customers use Intuned for a wide range of use cases, the main ones being: govtech and insurance tech. In addition, agencies that specialize in scraping for their customers.

Our Intuned agent and Web Task API always use reverse engineering when possible — the underlying agents have access to the network layer and can reverse engineer APIs when needed. At the end of the day, this comes down to what the user needs. We have seen cases where users need data from the network, and in these cases we skip the browser layer. In some other cases, we saw that users need to authenticate via the browser but then all the automation can be done via the network. We have also seen customers who want to get markdown of the pages in addition to hitting the APIs so a browser layer is a must.

Yes, we we did our YC and social launches, we had few companies sign up and we have been building with them sense. For some of them, we have enabled them to run 1000+ scrapers which would have been very hard without Intuned. Some of these have been with us for 2+ years! What our users love is the agent and the idea that we are not using AI at runtime which improves reliability.

this is not meant as personal assistant to do a task like this - the idea is that if you want to build a travel assistant and you want to do an integration with a travel booking service using browser automation - you can use Intuned to build this integration and expose an API to do search and one to do a booking, etc. Does this make sense?

thanks!

If you think about "price", "speed" and "accuracy (reliability/quality)", our bet is that models won't hit those 3 together. So you won't get a model that is very fast, very cheap and very accurate anytime soon.

Also, imagine that you have a case where you want to scrape 10,000 records from a website, why have AI navigate to every page to do this? why not write the code, run it, and get consistent and fast result? its also predictable, if it messes up, you know what happened and you can trace it to the exact line of code.

well, auth depends on the exact case, as an example, some 2FA we deal with it via code and we generate OPT on demand, on some cases, different approaches. One thing worth mentioning is that for auth, we allow you to attach a proxy to an auth session which will allow you to use that same IP with that auth session to reduce issues. One more thing, we have something called recorder auth session which basicly allows you to use a remote browser to authenticate and then we just save that.

thank you!

thanks! give us a try next time and checkout fix with ai when the scraper breaks!

thank you!

We actually do support CDP directly as well. As for why playwright, playwright provides a lot of benefits that we like in terms of being code - like auto-waiting, good syntax for a lot of operations, agents can use playwright pretty well and playwright is generally like by the community we target.

If a customer, doesn't want to use playwright, they don't have to given CDP but we most of our templates use playwright.

thanks!

definitely came up multiple times. Next week, we are releasing our codex/claude plugin, so you will be able to use codex to create the projects and deploy them to Intuned.

Intuned as a platform to deploy browser automation adds a lot - anti-bot detection, jobs, observability and more.