https://x.com/auren/status/2041190992171180437
AIs using the browser is insanely inefficient
my colleague Nimna created a claude skill for cowork to make it 800% faster - and open sourcing it
comment “skillz” here and i will get you to browser-optimizer skill
kicker: it even reverse-engineers any web app's hidden API in under 2 minutes … extending claude’s chrome extension
the problem: people will set up a sophisticated AI agent and then have it click through a web app one item at a time. like hiring a Formula 1 driver and making them push the car.
every modern web app is a thin UI layer over an API. the data you want is one fetch() call away. but most people -- and most AI agents -- default to the human path: navigate, click, wait, read, repeat.
the speed difference is NOT marginal. bulk API calls vs. manual page navigation is routinely 5-50x faster. i watched a workflow go from 2+ hours of manual clicking to 3 minutes by just intercepting the app's own API calls and reproducing them programmatically. It also includes workarounds for common blockers like PII filters on browser extensions, infinite scroll pages, and apps that use WebSockets instead of REST.
the hierarchy is simple. if the app has a direct API, use it. if not, check if the data is already sitting in the browser's memory (most React and Next.js apps dump everything into window globals on page load). if not, open the network tab, click ONE thing, find the API pattern, then bulk-fetch everything. DOM scraping is the last resort, not the first instinct.
this matters because AI agents are doing most of the repetitive work inside web apps. the agents that figure out the programmatic shortcut will be 10-50x more productive than the ones that simulate a human clicking around. same as how revenue per employee is about to go up 3-10x -- the gap between good and bad automation is enormous.
manual clicking is the new manual data entry. it's a failure state NOT a strategy.
(comment “skillz” here and i will get you to browser-optimizer skill)Apr 6, 2026 View on X →
Monday, April 6, 2026 AI