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Hi HN! Smooth CLI (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.smooth.sh">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.smooth.sh</a>) 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 (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;docs.smooth.sh&#x2F;features&#x2F;use-my-ip">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;docs.smooth.sh&#x2F;features&#x2F;use-my-ip</a>).Here’s a demo: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=62jthcU705k" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=62jthcU705k</a> Docs start at <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;docs.smooth.sh">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;docs.smooth.sh</a>.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 <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;vercel-labs&#x2F;agent-browser" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;vercel-labs&#x2F;agent-browser</a>). 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 <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;aifoc.us&#x2F;the-browser-is-the-sandbox" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;aifoc.us&#x2F;the-browser-is-the-sandbox</a> and <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=46762150">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=46762150</a>). 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:<pre><code> click(x=342, y=128)
 type(&quot;search query&quot;)
 click(x=401, y=130)
 scroll(down=500)
 click(x=220, y=340)
 ...50 more steps
</code></pre>
Your agent just says:<pre><code> Search for flights from NYC to LA and find the cheapest option
</code></pre>
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 (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;docs.smooth.sh&#x2F;features&#x2F;use-my-ip">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;docs.smooth.sh&#x2F;features&#x2F;use-my-ip</a>). 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 should not be aware of authentication details or be responsible for handling malicious behavior such as prompt injections. While some security responsibility will always remain with the agent, the browser should minimize this burden as much as possible.We’re biased of course, but in our tests, running Claude with Smooth CLI has been 20x faster and 5x cheaper than Claude Code with the --chrome flag (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.smooth.sh&#x2F;images&#x2F;comparison.gif">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.smooth.sh&#x2F;images&#x2F;comparison.gif</a>). Happy to explain further how we’ve tested this and to answer any questions about it!Instructions to install: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;docs.smooth.sh&#x2F;cli">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;docs.smooth.sh&#x2F;cli</a>. Plans and pricing: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;docs.smooth.sh&#x2F;pricing">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;docs.smooth.sh&#x2F;pricing</a>.It’s free to try, and we&#x27;d love to get feedback&#x2F;ideas if you give it a go :)We’d love to hear what you think, especially if you’ve tried using browsers with AI agents. Happy to answer questions, dig into tradeoffs, or explain any part of the design and implementation!

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I&#x27;m a software engineer who keeps getting pulled into DevOps no matter how hard I try to escape it. I recently moved into a Lead DevOps Engineer role writing tooling to automate a lot of the pain away. On my own time outside of work, I built Artifact Keeper — a self-hosted artifact registry that supports 45+ package formats. Security scanning, SSO, replication, WASM plugins — it&#x27;s all in the MIT-licensed release. No enterprise tier. No feature gates. No surprise invoices.Your package managers — pip, npm, docker, cargo, helm, go, all of them — talk directly to it using their native protocols. Security scanning with Trivy, Grype, and OpenSCAP is built in, with a policy engine that can quarantine bad artifacts before they hit your builds. And if you need a format it doesn&#x27;t support yet, there&#x27;s a WASM plugin system so you can add your own without forking the backend.Why I built it:Part of what pulled me into computers in the first place was open source. I grew up poor in New Orleans, and the only hardware I had access to in the early 2000s were some Compaq Pentium IIs my dad brought home after his work was tossing them out. I put Linux on them, and it ran circles around Windows 2000 and Millennium on that low-end hardware. That experience taught me that the best software is software that&#x27;s open for everyone to see, use, and that actually runs well on whatever you&#x27;ve got.Fast forward to today, and I see the same pattern everywhere: GitLab, JFrog, Harbor, and others ship a limited &quot;community&quot; edition and then hide the features teams actually need behind some paywall. I get it — paychecks have to come from somewhere. But I wanted to prove that a fully-featured artifact registry could exist as genuinely open-source software. Every feature. No exceptions.The specific features came from real pain points. Artifactory&#x27;s search is painfully slow — that&#x27;s why I integrated Meilisearch. Security scanning that doesn&#x27;t require a separate enterprise license was another big one. And I wanted replication that didn&#x27;t need a central coordinator — so I built a peer mesh where any node can replicate to any other node. I haven&#x27;t deployed this at work yet — right now I&#x27;m running it at home for my personal projects — but I&#x27;d love to see it tested at scale, and that&#x27;s a big part of why I&#x27;m sharing it here.The AI story (I&#x27;m going to be honest about this):I built this in about three weeks using Claude Code. I know a lot of you will say this is probably vibe coding garbage — but if that&#x27;s the case, it&#x27;s an impressive pile of vibe coding garbage. Go look at the codebase. The backend is ~80% Rust with 429 unit tests, 33 PostgreSQL migrations, a layered architecture, and a full CI&#x2F;CD pipeline with E2E tests, stress testing, and failure injection.AI didn&#x27;t make the design decisions for me. I still had to design the WASM plugin system, figure out how the scanning engines complement each other, and architect the mesh replication. Years of domain knowledge drove the design — AI just let me build it way faster. I&#x27;m floored at what these tools make possible for a tinkerer and security nerd like me.Tech stack: Rust on Axum, PostgreSQL 16, Meilisearch, Trivy + Grype + OpenSCAP, Wasmtime WASM plugins (hot-reloadable), mesh replication with chunked transfers. Frontend is Next.js 15 plus native Swift (iOS&#x2F;macOS) and Kotlin (Android) apps. OpenAPI 3.1 spec with auto-generated TypeScript and Rust SDKs.Try it:<pre><code> git clone https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;artifact-keeper&#x2F;artifact-keeper.git
 cd artifact-keeper
 docker compose up -d
</code></pre>
Then visit http:&#x2F;&#x2F;localhost:30080Live demo: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;demo.artifactkeeper.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;demo.artifactkeeper.com</a>
Docs: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;artifactkeeper.com&#x2F;docs&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;artifactkeeper.com&#x2F;docs&#x2F;</a>I&#x27;d love any feedback — what you think of the approach, what you&#x27;d want to see, what you hate about Artifactory or Nexus that you wish someone would just fix. It doesn&#x27;t have to be a PR. Open an issue, start a discussion, or just tell me here.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;artifact-keeper" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;artifact-keeper</a>

5:48:44 PM FRIDAY FEBRUARY 6, 2026

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