Smooth – Faster, cheaper browser agent API
Hey there HN! We're Antonio and Luca, and we're excited to introduce Smooth, a state-of-the-art browser agent that is 5x faster and 7x cheaper than Browser Use (https://docs.circlemind.co/performance). We built Smooth because existing browser agents were slow, expensive, and unreliable. Even simple tasks could take minutes and cost dollars in API credits. We started as users of Browser Use, but the pain was obvious. So we built something better. Smooth is 5x faster, 7x cheaper, and more reliable. And along the way, we discovered two principles that make agents actually work.…
In plain words
Smooth is a browser agent API designed to automate web tasks programmatically. It targets developers and businesses that need reliable browser automation for web scraping, testing, and task automation. The product distinguishes itself through performance optimization, delivering significantly faster execution and lower API costs compared to existing solutions while maintaining higher reliability for complex web interactions.
written from the facts on this page · September 2026
From the sources
In the maker’s words, at launch
Hey there HN! We're Antonio and Luca, and we're excited to introduce Smooth, a state-of-the-art browser agent that is 5x faster and 7x cheaper than Browser Use (https://docs.circlemind.co/performance). We built Smooth because existing browser agents were slow, expensive, and unreliable. Even simple tasks could take minutes and cost dollars in API credits. We started as users of Browser Use, but the pain was obvious. So we built something better. Smooth is 5x faster, 7x cheaper, and more reliable. And along the way, we discovered two principles that make agents actually work. (1) Think like the LLM (https://x.com/karpathy/status/1937902205765607626). The most important thing is to put yourself in the shoes of the LLM. This is especially important when designing the context. How you present the problem to the LLM determines whether it succeeds or fails. Imagine playing chess with an LLM. You could represent the board in countless ways - image, markdown, JSON, etc. Which one you choose matters more than any other part of the system. Clean, intuitive context is everything. We call this LLM-Ex. (2) Let them write code (https://arxiv.org/pdf/2401.07339) Tool calling is limited. If you want agents that can handle complex logic and manipulate objects reliably, you need code. Coding offers a richer, more composable action space. Suddenly, designing for the agent feels more like designing for a human developer, which makes everything simpler. By applying these two principles religiously, we realized you don't need huge models to get reliable results. Small, efficient models can get you higher reliability while also getting human-speed navigation and a huge cost reduction. How it works: 1. Extract: we look at the webpage and extract all relevant elements by looking at the rendered page. 2. Filter and Clean: then, we use some simple heuristics to clean up the webpage. If an element is not interactive, e.g. because a banner is covering it, we remove it. 3. Recursively separate sections: we use several heuristics to represent the webpage in a way that is both LLM-friendly and as similar as possible to how humans see it. We packaged Smooth in an easy API with instant browser spin-up, custom proxies, persistent sessions, and auto-CAPTCHA solvers. Our goal is to give you this infrastructure so that you can focus on what's important: building great apps for your users. Before we built this, Antonio was at Amazon, Luca was finishing a PhD at Oxford, and we've been obsessed with reliable AI agents for years. Now we know: if you want agents to work reliably, focus on the context. Try it for free at https://zero.circlemind.co/developer Docs are here: https://docs.circlemind.co Demo video: https://youtu.be/18v65oORixQ We'd love feedback :)
More ai this month
the category →
I trained a 125M-parameter transformer to autocomplete piano performances in real time (~108 notes/sec on an iPhone 15). The idea is basically GitHub Copilot or Tabnine, except instead of prompting it with code, you prompt it by playing a few notes on a MIDI piano. The model then continues what you played, entirely on-device. The app is free if anyone wants to try it. Happy to answer questions about the model, training, Core ML, or the many things that didn't work.
AI · 17d ago · simedw.com
Astute▲585Automate your B2B brand going viral, with new media creators
AI · 18d ago · company-app.joinastute.com
Hey HN, Henry from Cactus here! We previously released Cactus Needle, a 14MB agentic LLM for tool call, device use, and structured extraction for phones, wearables, smart homes, small robots and microcontrollers. We got really great feedback here, and have now incorporated the suggestions to release Needle 2. The whole model is a single 14MB binary that runs a full session in 28MB of RAM; 45m parameters at 2bit compression. Needle hits 500 tokens/sec decode speed on a Raspberry Pi 5, sits between 400-1,500 tokens/sec on VR devices like Meta Quest 3S and Apple Vision Pro, and ranges…
AI · 26d ago · cactuscompute.com
Launched alongside, August 2025
the whole month →
- IS
I built the world's most impractical 1000-pixel display and anyone in the world can draw on it. It draws a single pixel at a time and takes 30-60 minutes to complete a single image. Anyone can participate in the project by voting for the next image to be drawn, and submitting images. https://kilopx.com/
Work · 2025 · benholmen.com
- KT
Kitten TTS is an open-source series of tiny and expressive text-to-speech models for on-device applications. We are excited to launch a preview of our smallest model, which is less than 25 MB. This model has 15M parameters. This release supports English text-to-speech applications in eight voices: four male and four female. The model is quantized to int8 + fp16, and it uses onnx for runtime. The model is designed to run literally anywhere eg. raspberry pi, low-end smartphones, wearables, browsers etc. No GPU required! We're releasing this to give early users a sense of the latency and voices…
Dev tools · 2025 · github.com
- IW
I was wondering how I can arrange objects along a spherical helix path, and read some articles on it. I ended up learning about parametric equations again, and make this visualization to document what I learned: https://visualrambling.space/moving-objects-in-3d/ feel free to visit and let me know what you think!
Life & fun · 2025 · visualrambling.space
- TC
For HTML Day 2025 [1], I made a web service that displays the current sky at your approximate location as a CSS gradient. Colours are simulated on-demand using atmospheric absorption and scattering coefficients. Updates every minute, without the use of client-side JavaScript. Source code and additional information is available on GitHub: https://github.com/dnlzro/horizon [1] https://html.energy/html-day/2025/index.html
Dev tools · 2025 · sky.dlazaro.ca