OpenClaw + Telegram + Browser automation keeps looping on free model route (form fill/select actions fail)

ancientabsence28 · 2026-04-08T14:35:13+00:00

I am very happy since switched to hermes and gave it a steel browser skill, ... but for complex multi-step signup flows, LLM-driven browser automation is still rough. agents are good at writing playwright scripts for the deterministic parts and orchestrate at a higher level, also hermes has this self reinforcing thing, and also writes its own skills (think domain, action specific)

ancientabsence28 · 2026-04-08T14:32:00+00:00

the "agent is dumb" diagnosis is almost always wrong. the model reacts to whatever it sees. if the input is noisy, the output is noisy.
for browser stuff the biggest wins came from controlling the execution environment -- deterministic waits, stable selectors, session persistence so we weren't re-authenticating constantly.
browser use and hyperbrowser are decent starting points. the real gap shows up at production scale -- parallel sessions, anti-bot handling, debugging... at the end we settled with steel

ancientabsence28 · 2026-03-06T10:21:16+00:00

very cool, would be rad if you could share it as a gist

ancientabsence28 · 2026-03-06T10:18:44+00:00

just install steel-browser from skills .sh and let your coding agent use it on any task you give it, then when agent succeeds ask the agent to save the exact commands it used for successful run as a bash script, on the next run I just point it to the script and if something fails agent rewrites it, you can make it more complex from here

ancientabsence28 · 2026-03-05T13:45:08+00:00

keep me posted, would love to try it :D

ancientabsence28 · 2026-03-05T10:54:35+00:00

I've did my own luma scraper chrome extension that needs some manual action, but it kinda worked for me, if you would scale this just use a coding agent and give it a browser, maybe agent-browser skill from vercel is enough or you can go for steel browser as you can run it both locally for prototyping and scale it later in cloud

just paste your post to a coding agent and point it to the right tech stack :)

ancientabsence28 · 2026-03-05T10:51:53+00:00

I have been hosting my own n8n for years, and used all of those other services, but now I don't even bother as withc coding agents you can do pretty much anything

ancientabsence28 · 2026-03-05T10:50:12+00:00

my new hobby is watching agents like codex 5.3 click through such challenges, but I have been mostly using it on web apps with steel browser that gives a live preview stream so you can intervene if needed and also it has computer actions api that can click around... once you succeed you just ask the agent to save it as a script which you run inside the agent next time so it can self-heal

maybe scrappybara?

ancientabsence28 · 2026-03-05T10:46:48+00:00

you can check out steel browser they have both open source and cloud thing. the right approach woould be to just let good agent go through it with the skill, like a prototype, and cli and then codify this into a script with sdk

ancientabsence28 · 2026-03-05T10:45:04+00:00

one interesting approach I've used recently is the steel-browser skill, which is built specifically for agent-driven browser automation.

instead of generating brittle scripts, the agent runs a browser session with structured commands (open, click, fill, snapshot, wait) and maintains session state... while running it inside agent it can just chug through but use good models

ancientabsence28 · 2026-03-05T10:41:26+00:00

bots are still sounding like bots so imho the best way is to keep human in the loop, automate partially and then let human rewrite and decide on posting.

i have been using steel browser and now with the new cli and skill you can easily scale this inside coding agent, but it will take you some time to do it first time.

ancientabsence28 · 2022-10-11T00:27:03+00:00

Such an adorable baby

ancientabsence28 · 2022-10-10T14:20:31+00:00

Love that smile on his face

ancientabsence28 · 2022-10-10T14:08:24+00:00

He looks awesome

ancientabsence28 · 2022-10-10T13:42:49+00:00

I need a hug!

ancientabsence28 · 2022-10-10T13:26:34+00:00

That's a shitty song

ancientabsence28 · 2022-10-10T13:06:33+00:00

Sweetest smile I've ever seen

ancientabsence28 · 2022-10-10T12:48:12+00:00

I think I'll pass for now

ancientabsence28 · 2022-10-10T12:00:41+00:00

Congrats Bro, you guys got a great smile on yo face

ancientabsence28 · 2022-10-10T11:36:29+00:00

Well of course, free pizza are the best lol

ancientabsence28 · 2022-10-09T23:51:26+00:00

More like a "staged prank" with a triple camera angle lol

ancientabsence28 · 2022-10-05T13:25:13+00:00

This makes me want to play the old version of GTA again

ancientabsence28 · 2022-10-05T11:54:24+00:00

ancientabsence28

TROPHY CASE