<rss version="2.0" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"><channel><title>Hacker News: marcon680</title><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=marcon680</link><description>Hacker News RSS</description><docs>https://hnrss.org/</docs><generator>hnrss v2.1.1</generator><lastBuildDate>Thu, 16 Apr 2026 03:28:16 +0000</lastBuildDate><atom:link href="https://hnrss.org/user?id=marcon680" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml"></atom:link><item><title><![CDATA[Show HN: Montage – Quickly build product launch videos with coding agents]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Montage is a fork of Remotion's NextJS template, set up for coding agents to quickly produce motion graphics videos.<p>In May 2025 I commissioned a team of motion designers to create a launch video. It cost us $2000 and 4-5 days of my full attention.<p>I noticed the video was likely built using a set of animations and transitions that this motion design team reused for all their customers. My theory was that if I could recreate that set of animation primitives and put them in a format coding agents could understand, I'd be able to create launch videos end-to-end way faster and have full control over the final product.<p>I spent 3 days setting up the repo and 4 hours building the motion video you see above. Those 3 days consisted of 1) building out the set of primitives and 2) building the iterative agent rendering loop so the agent could work autonomously.<p>The primitives I built were:<p>Text (word drag-in, flip-up, gradient fill, typing animation)
Motion (object pop in, fade right, fade left, swoop, float, etc.)
React components (logo, cursor, animated browser, animated terminal)
Background designs (radial gradient, corner gradient, color fade, etc.)<p>The way I built these primitives was surprisingly simple. I leveraged Gemini's ability to analyze videos (Claude and GPT don't accept videos as a modality yet) by attaching the previous motion-designed video and giving it this prompt:<p>"Is it possible for you to thoroughly go throughout the video and, in detail, note all the different text transitions and what they look like, describing them in natural language so I can put them in my animation tool?"<p>It gave me a text file which I dumped into a coding agent (in my case Claude Code) to build animation primitives with. I repeated that for motion transitions and background designs, and modified existing React components to work with Remotion.<p>For building the iterative agent rendering loop, I gave the agent the ability to test its sections end to end.<p>Remotion can render individual frames via a bash command (npx remotion still {flags}) so I put in the AGENTS.md to heavily use that when designing sections. I also tried having the agent browser-use the Remotion editor spun up as a local dev server, but this was too confusing — it had to know how to scrub through frames in the UI, select the right sequence to check, etc. So I ended up sticking with the  Bash command and found that coding agents could do a decent job testing animations by rendering frames 10-20 steps apart.<p>I'd love for you to try this out and welcome any feedback. Montage has really helped me create high-quality motion videos (an example is in the repo).</p>
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<p>Comments URL: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47263802">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47263802</a></p>
<p>Points: 1</p>
<p># Comments: 0</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 05 Mar 2026 16:37:10 +0000</pubDate><link>https://github.com/simplexlabs/montage</link><dc:creator>marcon680</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47263802</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47263802</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by marcon680 in "Launch HN: Simplex (YC S24) – Browser automation platform for developers"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Generally our use cases are completely different -- if a user is doing scraping, it's been structured scraping on a small (<50) set of sites where they need to be able to pull data from a website as if it was an API call, not as a way to web-crawl and get masses of training data.<p>We gate full access to the platform partially for this reason. We debated giving fewer than 50 free browser sessions, for example, and have already banned a few accounts from our self-serve today that were unidentifiable/"company accounts" without a legitimate web presence.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 03 Oct 2025 07:06:07 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45459928</link><dc:creator>marcon680</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45459928</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45459928</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by marcon680 in "Launch HN: Simplex (YC S24) – Browser automation platform for developers"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>We have paying customers in production at the Growth and Enterprise plans :)</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 03 Oct 2025 00:16:50 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45457207</link><dc:creator>marcon680</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45457207</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45457207</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by marcon680 in "Launch HN: Simplex (YC S24) – Browser automation platform for developers"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>We've generally seen the "easy" flows not actually be easy. Workflows that have complex branching logic (shown when filling out the Aetna form in the first example in the video), structured scraping (the second example we showed in the video), and login/2FA/intelligent multi-agent scraping (shown in the last example in the video), are all things that are difficult to impossible to do with traditional automation libraries.<p>We also have an example of a complex, multi-agent workflow here that might be useful for you to look at: <a href="https://www.simplex.sh/blog/context-engineering-for-web-agents">https://www.simplex.sh/blog/context-engineering-for-web-agen...</a></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 02 Oct 2025 18:08:42 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45453247</link><dc:creator>marcon680</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45453247</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45453247</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by marcon680 in "Launch HN: Simplex (YC S24) – Browser automation platform for developers"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Yep we actually cache flows after first run! This makes flows that are closer to traditional RPA pretty much the same as using Playwright/Puppeteer.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 02 Oct 2025 18:02:28 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45453168</link><dc:creator>marcon680</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45453168</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45453168</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by marcon680 in "Launch HN: Simplex (YC S24) – Browser automation platform for developers"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>From my understanding, Browserbase mostly provides remote browsers for their users. We also provide remote browsers, but with a lot more infrastructure on top (single/multi web agents, caching/reliability support, an agentic IDE/editor, etc).</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 02 Oct 2025 17:47:44 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45452955</link><dc:creator>marcon680</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45452955</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45452955</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by marcon680 in "Launch HN: Simplex (YC S24) – Browser automation platform for developers"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Will fix, thanks for flagging!</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 02 Oct 2025 17:37:22 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45452824</link><dc:creator>marcon680</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45452824</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45452824</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by marcon680 in "Launch HN: Simplex (YC S24) – Browser automation platform for developers"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Good questions! Will add these and put a data processors page tonight. We use Anthropic/OpenAI models.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 02 Oct 2025 17:30:24 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45452740</link><dc:creator>marcon680</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45452740</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45452740</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by marcon680 in "Launch HN: Simplex (YC S24) – Browser automation platform for developers"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Could I ask why the flow starts with a human logging in? Is it because you're using their credentials and/or have some sensitivity around storing their credentials? Or is it something to do with 2FA (we handle 2FA)? Or are you just storing the session data after they log in so you can re-use it for those few months you mentioned?<p>Re: Puppeteer automation as part of the script -- we have a feature we wrote for one of our customers that we didn't promote to production where you can define a deterministic action in the dashboard that allows you to paste in JavaScript, but we're likely not to push that to prod anytime soon. Could you explain your reasoning for wanting to use Puppeteer still? We've generally seen customers fully switch over to Simplex instead of relying on their original Puppeteer/Playwright scripts -- since we have action caching, the underlying script (click on div locator with this div id, etc.) is pretty similar to what you'd get using Playwright.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 02 Oct 2025 17:24:19 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45452655</link><dc:creator>marcon680</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45452655</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45452655</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by marcon680 in "Launch HN: Simplex (YC S24) – Browser automation platform for developers"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Yes, it's a huge pain from what we've seen. That portal is actually running in production for some of our AR/AP AI customers, and getting browser agents to properly parse that page was difficult -- Coupa injects all the DOM elements through a JavaScript <script/> tag like 2-5 seconds after the page loads, non-deterministically. :)</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 02 Oct 2025 17:12:44 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45452476</link><dc:creator>marcon680</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45452476</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45452476</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by marcon680 in "Launch HN: Simplex (YC S24) – Browser automation platform for developers"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Currently no, it's just the three options (free vs. $2500/month vs. larger enterprise plans). We do usually offer 2-3 month ramp up periods for the $2500/month plans that are usage based.<p>To be transparent, we're an early startup, and a big part of that is user validation. We've been lucky to have companies as small as 5 people sign onto our $2500/month plan -- it shows some commitment on their side and helps us understand whether it's a real problem for our users. That's the same reason the $2500/month plan isn't self serve (you have to talk to us first).<p>We're definitely thinking of adding a pay as you go plan! But we aren't there yet re: our understanding of the market, if that makes sense.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 02 Oct 2025 17:08:45 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45452412</link><dc:creator>marcon680</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45452412</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45452412</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[Launch HN: Simplex (YC S24) – Browser automation platform for developers]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Hi HN! We’re Marco and Shreya, founders of Simplex (<a href="https://www.simplex.sh/">https://www.simplex.sh/</a>). We’re building all the infrastructure you need for modern browser automation – including remote browsers, steerable web agents, and more.<p>Here’s a demo: <a href="https://youtu.be/7KpWJbOcm1Y" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/7KpWJbOcm1Y</a><p>We’re excited to be posting on HN again! Back in January, we Show HN’d the earliest version of Simplex (<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42704160">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42704160</a>). We’ve now spent close to a year working with real customers, forward-deploying into their codebases, and building web agent systems for them from the ground up to understand what it takes to get agents working in production.<p>We built Simplex because we started seeing a pattern: companies would initially roll their own Playwright/Stagehand web automation solutions. This worked fine in the early prototype stages, but they’d quickly get overwhelmed with technical challenges as they productionized automations across all the websites their customers use.<p>As they scaled, they’d have to build and manage:<p>- Chrome infrastructure: You'll need remote browsers, extension support, browser settings for anti-bot detection/stealth, and a hundred more small fixes.<p>- DOM parsing: We’ve seen many web portals have really weird quirks (nested iframes, shadow DOM elements, dynamic loading, popups, unstable selectors, etc..) that are hard to parse with traditional/existing browser agents.<p>- Agent context engineering: Website state, user prompts, system prompts, past actions all take up a massive amount of context. Without managing this, agents can get caught in loops or take wrong actions.<p>- Caching/reliability: No matter how perfect your prompts are, it’s hard to guarantee consistency without caching/deterministic actions.<p>- Login/2FA: Solve captcha, fetch 2FA from email/text/Google Auth, encrypt/decrypt credentials to access portals blocked by login.<p>- Automation management: You’ll have to store all your prompts, scrapers, and agents, and find a way to make them reusable if you have the same workflows across different portals.<p>- User interface: Creating new workflows + debugging can take time. You’ll have to find easy ways to expose this to your engineers to make the process more efficient when you have hundreds of automations to build.<p>Simplex is a proper solution that handles all of the above for you. We offer both an UI/dashboard (which is what we use even as technical developers) and an extensive API for customers who are using Simplex in their existing AI agents. Our dashboard/API docs are here: <a href="https://simplex.sh/docs">https://simplex.sh/docs</a>. We’d love for you to check them out!<p>You can get started for free with Simplex at (<a href="https://www.simplex.sh/">https://www.simplex.sh/</a>) (you have to register to prevent abuse since we’re giving you a remote browser that connects to the internet).<p>Our first users have been AI companies across different industries like accounting, logistics/transportation, customer service, and healthtech. We’ve seen them:<p>- Fill out prior authorization forms on medical provider portals<p>- Download hundreds of PDFs from grocer portals across the US<p>- Automate and scrape structured data from traditional ERPs like NetSuite<p>- Submit bids/shipments on logistics/TMS portals<p>- Scrape lawyer/doctor license information across public government portals<p>- And more!<p>We’re excited to see more use cases as we open up the platform – this is our first time doing self-serve.<p>Wanted to end with a quick thank you to HN. The feedback on our first Show HN gave us confidence to steer our product in this direction, and has deeply shaped the last year of our lives. We’d love feedback, especially from anyone who’s tried solving this problem or built similar tools.<p>Happy to answer questions and looking forward to your comments!</p>
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<p>Comments URL: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45451547">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45451547</a></p>
<p>Points: 54</p>
<p># Comments: 28</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 02 Oct 2025 16:07:23 +0000</pubDate><link>https://www.simplex.sh/</link><dc:creator>marcon680</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45451547</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45451547</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[Context engineering for production-grade web agents]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Article URL: <a href="https://www.simplex.sh/blog/context-engineering-for-web-agents">https://www.simplex.sh/blog/context-engineering-for-web-agents</a></p>
<p>Comments URL: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44735555">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44735555</a></p>
<p>Points: 2</p>
<p># Comments: 0</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 30 Jul 2025 15:32:31 +0000</pubDate><link>https://www.simplex.sh/blog/context-engineering-for-web-agents</link><dc:creator>marcon680</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44735555</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44735555</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by marcon680 in "Show HN: Simplex: Automate browser workflows using code and natural language"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Some of the things we're trying to differently are 1) making flows deterministic by using vision models that have a consistent output given an image and an input query and 2) breaking up flows into these smaller atomic actions in order to improve consistency as well.<p>RE: workflows w/ complex forms and tabs -- do you have some sites that are good examples of this? We'd love to see how Simplex does.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 15 Jan 2025 19:29:52 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42715782</link><dc:creator>marcon680</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42715782</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42715782</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by marcon680 in "Show HN: Simplex: Automate browser workflows using code and natural language"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Thanks John! We should make that more clear in the docs. You can set browser=None on initialization and Simplex will create a local browser instance that can run on your local websites. We're not planning to be open source right now since a large portion of our product is custom vision models + inference speedups through hosting.<p>Browser Use is another YC company. Probably the biggest difference is that they're more agent focused while we're more lower level -- in the Claude Computer Use camp like you mentioned.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 15 Jan 2025 19:25:27 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42715737</link><dc:creator>marcon680</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42715737</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42715737</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by marcon680 in "Show HN: Simplex: Automate browser workflows using code and natural language"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Thanks! We're happy to add more REST API functionality -- could you email us at founders@simplex.sh if you're up to talk further about what you'd like to see? RE: pricing, we're still figuring this out!</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 15 Jan 2025 17:04:01 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42713657</link><dc:creator>marcon680</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42713657</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42713657</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by marcon680 in "Show HN: Simplex: Automate browser workflows using code and natural language"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Yeah sure! We mentioned a little bit in the post that we stumbled upon this problem when working on a synthetic data contract. Internally, we were building software at the time to fully automate the process of creating synthetic data, all the way from purchasing assets to building scene layouts to rendering images. We realized after 2 months of building that there wasn't a great need for this problem nor could we build something minimal but feature-complete that we could give to people and iterate off of. We also saw the writing on the wall re: building 3D world models (see WorldLabs and NVIDIA's new 3D world models). We're excited to see where this goes!</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 15 Jan 2025 11:33:28 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42709788</link><dc:creator>marcon680</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42709788</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42709788</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by marcon680 in "Show HN: Simplex: Automate browser workflows using code and natural language"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>So sorry about this, it looks like our servers went down overnight. Just fixed, should be good now!</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 15 Jan 2025 11:25:47 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42709732</link><dc:creator>marcon680</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42709732</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42709732</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by marcon680 in "Show HN: Simplex: Automate browser workflows using code and natural language"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>We finetune our own VLMs for this -- unfortunately prefer not to share which ones we use specifically! ClickClickClick looks awesome, have you heard of FerretUI (<a href="https://arxiv.org/pdf/2404.05719" rel="nofollow">https://arxiv.org/pdf/2404.05719</a>)? Pretty similar idea.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 15 Jan 2025 05:12:57 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42707559</link><dc:creator>marcon680</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42707559</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42707559</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by marcon680 in "Show HN: Simplex: Automate browser workflows using code and natural language"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Yep, any websocket URL works. I see that Browserless offers a websocket URL, so you can use them! You just need to pass in a Playwright browser object into the Simplex constructor.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 15 Jan 2025 04:48:03 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42707427</link><dc:creator>marcon680</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42707427</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42707427</guid></item></channel></rss>