Show HN: Workflow Use – Deterministic, self-healing browser automation (RPA 2.0)

I love the use of reusable non-LLM code for the "happy path" and only using the LLM to create a workflow or repair it.

One area for improve seems to be the checkboxes/radio buttons (possibility other input types?) given the demo didn't pick up on that (it did make the same selections but it didn't recognize this was a multiple-choice input). It might be useful to have a step before creating the JSON where it asks the user some follow up questions like, "Here are the inputs I found and my understanding of their data type". And then go through each input asking for a default value and maybe even clarification on "Should we even prompt for this?" (Example, always select country X).

I wonder if, for workflow repair purposes, it would be helpful to, at recording time, save more contextual information about the fields you are filling/clicking on. "This a country selector", "This is the birthdate field", etc. So that if the xpath/css/etc fails you can give the LLM doing the repair work a description of what it's looking for.

I'm excited to see more efforts in QA testing with things like this. Brittle e2e tests are the bane of my (limited) automated experience and the ability to auto-heal and/or deal with minor deviations would be wonderful.

Very cool. 1) How do you deal with timings? If a step includes clicking on a link or something that needs loading, then if you just fire off the generated playwright code at at once, some steps might fail because the xpath is not there yet. So to be safe, i'm guessing you would have to wait using the difference in the timestamps in the json. 2. For self healing, we worked on something similar, and we found it's very easy to get off the rails if one step fails because if your assertions of if the fix was correct are off, then the next and next steps will also fail etc. The most stable way was to just regenerate all steps if a step fails in 2 attempts (2 runs of the flow) consecutively. If the xpath is broken for a step, very likely the subsequent ones won't be worth healing individually.

Very cool evolution!

Really great to see the fallback to the agentic run when the automation breaks. For our e2e testing browser automation at Donobu, we independently arrived at the same pattern and have been impressed with how well it works. Automatic self-healed PR example here: https://github.com/donobu-inc/playwright-flows/pull/6/files

edit: typo

This is a really interesting direction, Gregor & Magnus! You're spot on about enterprises needing more robust and self-healing solutions for their high-frequency automation.

It's true that many are looking into self-healing for existing automation scripts; from what I've seen, tools like Healenium are gaining some traction in this space. However, I agree that a Browser Use-like approach also holds a lot of promise here.

My thinking on how this could be achieved with AI agents like Browser Use is to run the existing automation scripts as usual. If a script breaks due to an "element not found" exception or similar issues, the AI agent could then be triggered to analyze the page, identify the correct new locator for the problematic element, and dynamically update or "heal" the script. I've actually put together a small proof-of-concept demonstrating this idea using Browser Use: https://www.loom.com/share/1af87d78d6814512b17a8f949c28ef13?...

I had explored a similar concept previously with Lavague setup here: https://www.loom.com/share/9b0c7cf0bdd6492f885a2c974ca8a4be?...

Another avenue, particularly relevant for existing test suites, is how many QA teams manage their locators. Often, these are centralized in files like POM.xml (for Java/Maven projects) or external spreadsheets/CSVs. An AI agent could potentially be used to proactively scan the application and update these locator repositories.

For instance,

I've experimented with a workflow where Browser Use updates a CSV file of locators weekly based on changes detected on the website: https://www.loom.com/share/821f80fcb0694be4bd4d979e94900990?...

Excited to see how Workflow Use evolves, especially the self-healing aspects!

Haha was just thinking last week there should be a tool called “show don’t tell” that infers a routine from recording, great minds think alike :)) Awesome feature guys, looking forward to playing around!

If any one wanna try it in browser can try implement it on our chrome extension code base in typescript: https://github.com/nanobrowser/nanobrowser, we support browser use and re wrote its code in typescript, not yet supporting workflow use and love to hear how it works from community!

This is amazing. We've been using BrowserUser to try and create deterministic playwright scripts for months with mixed results.

So, so, so excited to see this

It's not mentioned here but Kapwork contributed the beginnings of this work in a PR a couple weeks ago: https://github.com/browser-use/browser-use/pull/1437. Thank you Gregor & Magnus for the great tech and all you're doing for the community.

Care to share your thoughts on muscle-mem, the recent, related "meta-tool" for caching "agent trajectories"? https://github.com/pig-dot-dev/muscle-mem

This project resonates with me a lot. Call me old-fashioned, but I still appreciate a nice ole' deterministic program that I can fully understand and operate reliably.

With that said, there is undoubtedly still room to innovate on the long-tail of RPA. In the healthcare domain, for example, there are 1000s of sites that might need to be scraped occasionally, somewhat transactionally as e.g. a new patient comes in. However, there are other sites that need regular attention and even the smallest of errors can be catastrophic.

The combination of browser-use & workflow-use seems like a really natural fit for such use cases. Nice work!

We've also experimented with the self-healing ideas you are playing with here. In our case, we wrote a chrome extension that connects to an LLM of your choice as well as a process running locally on your machine. You write a description of the job to be done, click around the browser, and then click "go". The extension grabs all the context, asks the LLM to write a typescript program, sends that typescript program to the local process where it is compiled & type-checked against our internal workflow harness, and then immediately allows you to execute the program against your existing, open browser context.

We've found that even this basic loop is outrageously productive. If the script doesn't do what you expect, there is a big "FIX IT" button that lets you tweak and try again. For the record, we're not a competitor and have no intention of trying to sell/offer this extension externally.

I suspect one of the harder parts about this whole ordeal will be how to integrate with the rest of the workflow stack. For us, we've really appreciated the fact that our extension outputs typescript that seamlessly fits into our stack and that is more easily verifiable than JSON. The TS target also allows us to do nice things like tell the self-healing bot which libraries will be available so that e.g. it can use `date-fns` instead of `Date`. We've also thought about adopting more traditional workflow tools like Temporal to manage the core workflow logic, vending out the browser connectivity remotely. Curious how you guys are thinking about this?

Rooting for you guys, we will be sure to keep an eye on your progress and consider adopting the technology as it matures!

PS. If you like things like this, want to work at a growing health-tech startup, and live in Boston, we're hiring! Reach out here: https://wgwx7h7be0p.typeform.com/to/LV0t8OjI

We use selenium for RPAs. Saving this as an alternative to explore.

So I can use this and it will pull new data from a database I can use to have it fill out a form? And I can trigger it when I need it to run with the updated form information?

Can utilizing Chrome Extensions be added? It seems no one has and would be a critical bridge to many browser tasks

seems similar to selenium plugin for firefox, minus the scripting it generates.

Cool stuff!

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