wittydeveloper
Joined 14 years ago
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209
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Member since
Jul 12
Recent submissions
Comment · 1 month ago
Nope, you can also deploy and manage your own browsers as soon as they accept custom extensions.
Comment · 1 month ago
Does "agent-based" here mean a CLI/Coding agent or software-level agents you built?
I'd say that Stagehand is subtly faster for local use cases (batching, in-extension design) while covering both CLI (via https://browse.sh) and framework-level use, whereas agent-browser is CLI-only.
Comment · 1 month ago
The cache serves as a managed server-side layer in the Stagehand API, keyed to instruction, page content, and the options you provide. Model configuration is intentionally excluded from the cache, so switching models does not invalidate it. If the page structure changes, the call does not result in a cache hit, and we revert to full inference. Additionally, any cached selector that no longer resolves will also revert, with self-healing disabled during replay.
Regarding the local file issue: currently, caching keys are based on a Browserbase session. This means that with a purely local browser, the cache option has no effect, and there’s nothing to verify. Each call returns metadata (including status, miss reason, threshold, count, and tokens saved) so you can observe churn rather than make guesses about it.
Comment · 1 month ago
We removed agent because so many great harnesses are available in the ecosystem.
Instead of keeping it, we decided to make Stagehand v4 better integrated with popular harnesses, both at the Coding Agent level (Codex, Claude Code) and frameworks level (Eve, Deep Agents, Mastra, etc)
Comment · 1 month ago
Exactly, as Stagehand now runs inside the browser, you'll save on the round trip.
Also, enabling batch actions will further accelerate your test suite.
Comment · 1 month ago
Nope, Stagehand is open-source and works with local browsers by default.
Comment · 1 month ago
A lot, especially for performance. That's why we built our own benchmarks that account for both the model and the harness.
For example, with Claude Opus 5, the accuracy gap can be up to 3% and performance up to 200ms, depending on whether you're using Deep Agents, Eve, or Fx.
More details here: https://www.stagehand.dev/evals
Comment · 1 month ago
It still uses CDP but communicates from an extension within the browser instead of a script running in a separate runtime or, worse, in a separate region.
Comment · 1 month ago
We built Stagehand 2 years ago (24k stars and 4M monthly npm downloads) and recently fixed its biggest flaw: round-trip latency.
Every action performed requires a round trip between your script and the browser (short when running locally but increased when running in the cloud). We also saw multiple posts complaining about the eager token appetite of Playwright MCP.
For this reason, we rebuilt Stagehand from the ground up and shipped v4, where Stagehand controls the browser from an extension automatically loaded upon your browser startup.
Stagehand v4 comes with batch command support, dedicated token-efficient methods `act()` and `extract()`, and a brand new architecture making it 2x faster than Playwright and 80% more token efficient.
You can see for yourself by looking at our benchmarks, comparing its performance across a dozen models (frontier and open weights) and tools (Codex, Claude Code, and more): https://www.stagehand.dev/evals
Ask me anything!