Smooth CLI – Token-efficient browser for AI agents
Hi HN! Smooth CLI (https://www.smooth.sh) is a browser that agents like Claude Code can use to navigate the web reliably, quickly, and affordably. It lets agents specify tasks using natural language, hiding UI complexity, and allowing them to focus on higher-level intents to carry out complex web tasks. It can also use your IP address while running browsers in the cloud, which helps a lot with roadblocks like captchas (https://docs.smooth.sh/features/use-my-ip). Here’s a demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=62jthcU705k Docs start at…
In plain words
Smooth CLI is a browser designed for AI agents like Claude Code to navigate websites using natural language instructions. It handles web tasks efficiently and cost-effectively while hiding interface complexity so agents can focus on higher-level objectives. The tool runs browsers in the cloud and can use a user's IP address to bypass challenges like captchas, enabling AI agents to perform complex web-based work beyond command-line limitations.
written from the facts on this page · September 2026
From the sources
In the maker’s words, at launch
Hi HN! Smooth CLI (https://www.smooth.sh) is a browser that agents like Claude Code can use to navigate the web reliably, quickly, and affordably. It lets agents specify tasks using natural language, hiding UI complexity, and allowing them to focus on higher-level intents to carry out complex web tasks. It can also use your IP address while running browsers in the cloud, which helps a lot with roadblocks like captchas (https://docs.smooth.sh/features/use-my-ip). Here’s a demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=62jthcU705k Docs start at https://docs.smooth.sh. Agents like Claude Code, etc are amazing but mostly restrained to the CLI, while a ton of valuable work needs a browser. This is a fundamental limitation to what these agents can do. So far, attempts to add browsers to these agents (Claude’s built-in --chrome, Playwright MCP, agent-browser, etc.) all have interfaces that are unnatural for browsing. They expose hundreds of tools - e.g. click, type, select, etc - and the action space is too complex. (For an example, see the low-level details listed at https://github.com/vercel-labs/agent-browser). Also, they don’t handle the billion edge cases of the internet like iframes nested in iframes nested in shadow-doms and so on. The internet is super messy! Tools that rely on the accessibility tree, in particular, unfortunately do not work for a lot of websites. We believe that these tools are at the wrong level of abstraction: they make the agent focus on UI details instead of the task to be accomplished. Using a giant general-purpose model like Opus to click on buttons and fill out forms ends up being slow and expensive. The context window gets bogged down with details like clicks and keystrokes, and the model has to figure out how to do browser navigation each time. A smaller model in a system specifically designed for browsing can actually do this much better and at a fraction of the cost and latency. Security matters too - probably more than people realize. When you run an agent on the web, you should treat it like an untrusted actor. It should access the web using a sandboxed machine and have minimal permissions by default. Virtual browsers are the perfect environment for that. There’s a good write up by Paul Kinlan that explains this very well (see https://aifoc.us/the-browser-is-the-sandbox and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46762150). Browsers were built to interact with untrusted software safely. They’re an isolation boundary that already works. Smooth CLI is a browser designed for agents based on what they’re good at. We expose a higher-level interface to let the agent think in terms of goals and tasks, not low-level details. For example, instead of this: click(x=342, y=128) type("search query") click(x=401, y=130) scroll(down=500) click(x=220, y=340) ...50 more steps Your agent just says: Search for flights from NYC to LA and find the cheapest option Agents like Claude Code can use the Smooth CLI to extract hard-to-reach data, fill-in forms, download files, interact with dynamic content, handle authentication, vibe-test apps, and a lot more. Smooth enables agents to launch as many browsers and tasks as they want, autonomously, and on-demand. If the agent is carrying out work on someone’s behalf, the agent’s browser presents itself to the web as a device on the user’s network. The need for this feature may diminish over time, but for now it’s a necessary primitive. To support this, Smooth offers a “self” proxy that creates a secure tunnel and routes all browser traffic through your machine’s IP address (https://docs.smooth.sh/features/use-my-ip). This is one of our favorite features because it makes the agent look like it’s running on your machine, while keeping all the benefits of running in the cloud. We also take away as much security responsibility from the agent as possible. The agent…
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