None of the below is endorsement.
For transparency, the full chat transcript is here.
A lot of my time is spent buying equipment for experiments, a uniquely painful task that all indie lab owners have to do. This is hard and tedious. I also spend too much time trying to optimise prices. Equipment buying is particularly tricky for electrical components required in experiments, like different resistors, transistors, and custom parts that you wouldn’t be able to get from a set. Sometimes I need to select forty different individual components from a website catalog, without error, to do one experiment.
Reducing friction of this process is likely to increase the productivity of independent scientists greatly.
One solution is to try automate online shopping for experiment equipment. Electrical component manufacturers don’t have APIs where I can send order requests. Nor does Amazon or online stores in general. To get around this, I'm using the beta version of Claude Code Desktop's browser feature, which allows Claude Code to interact with a browser in-app, just as if it was a person clicking around the website.
One experiment on my shelf that I've avoided doing because of the pain of getting all the components is "A simple, sensitive circuit to measure Boltzmann's constant from Johnson's noise," Eur. J. Phys. 31 (2010) 675–679 by J. C. Rodríguez-Luna and J. de Urquijo.
So I decided to just give this paper to Claude Code Desktop and let it rip, and asked it put all the equipment I need in the shopping cart.
In short, Claude Code operates the browser autonomously and does the following:
It read the paper
Made a list of stuff that I needed (I am not sure if this is correct though, I haven't pulled the trigger), with recommendations for the more expensive items like an oscilloscope
Adapted it to a breadboard version that I wanted
Then searched for the items on the online store of Farnell's (an electrical component retailer)
Made an xlsx matching the store's bulk upload format
Found the codes of the things I needed and added it to the xlsx
Uploaded the xlsx
Then added everything to cart
Some cool things
It replaced the outdated components (since the paper is old) with the modern version
It seemed to optimise cost
Made a widget list so I could follow what's happening
There were two dangerous mistakes
It mistakenly added qty = 5000 for two components, making the total shop 500GBP
It mistakenly added parts that had to be ordered from the US which added cost. These were replaceable by parts on the website from the UK (after I prompted it to do so)
And a few annoying things
It’s slow
I had to prompt it quite a lot, needed handholding
I had to delete things manually from the basket if it admitted it made a mistake
Responses near the end on some questions I had on being able to use audio interfaces to measure voltage variance was just too confusing.
Overall I'm happy with it because even with the mistakes it still cut down a lot of time. Here are some screenshots of what went on (next time I’ll do a screen capture). Claude Code is operating the browser autonomously.
Here it uploads the bulk requirements…
Here its checking if the parts exist….
This is what was in the basket…
