Show HN: Prism – Let browser agents access any app
prismai.shRight now, we're focused on building connectors for our customers, which has not yet involved Captcha solving.
We initially tried manually uploading session cookies to our browser agent after we authenticate locally. But soon realized how unscalable that is. We needed a general purpose API that allows our agents to auth into any application reliably. We needed something like Prism because making an agent reliable for our vertical is hard enough and I don't want us to maintain infrastructure just for the purposes of managing test user credentials and session management. If you're using browser agents and they've "hit the auth wall", then you know what I'm talking about.
Thanks for building Prism for us and letting us be a pilot customer. The API is straightforward and a pleasure to use. Can't wait for user sign-up and GitHub auth support to come soon.
Or did it bypass it entirely with corporation from the website?
When our agent signs in, we input the forwarded otp code to get access.
I'm biased as we are working on similar problems at Stytch, but I do think OAuth-style scoped consent flows are a better way of handling this: https://stytch.com/blog/connected-apps-consent/ . Otherwise, the blast radius is enormous. Any plans to support OAuth or some other scoped-down permissioning?
One risk with these new standards for agent auth - which we will of course support if our customers want it - is that the websites that need them the most are the least likely to adopt them.
The main use cases for browser agents are for paying utility bills on old government websites or finding receipts for an expense report on a website without an API. There is a no reason to use browser agents on a website like Linear for example. A developer is better off integrating via API or MCP.
Therein lies the main challenge; the websites where browser agents are most useful are the same websites that are least likely to adopt new technology (it was their not adopting new technologies that made them good candidates for this browser agents in the first place).
I think this new standard is awesome, but I fear that the websites that support it will be those websites that didn't need it in the first place (because they could just as easily add an API).
I see what you're saying here, this is a "Plaid, for everything else on the web" move. Interesting!