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pilo
TypeScript2026–2026
mozilla / pilo

pilo

A powerful AI-powered web automation tool that helps you get answers and take actions in the browser.

2Distinct people
2Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
118GitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

A powerful AI-powered web automation tool that helps you get answers and take actions in the browser.

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use has been verified yet.

What people are saying

No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

No other repository is repeatedly linked in the same discussions.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 12:54:37 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by hour2 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2026-02-24 16:31:39 UTC to 2026-02-24 18:16:10 UTC.

012026-02-24 16:00:00 UTC to 2026-02-24 17:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 1 submissions, 0 commentsFeb 24, 16:002026-02-24 17:00:00 UTC to 2026-02-24 18:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 commentsFeb 24, 17:002026-02-24 18:00:00 UTC to 2026-02-24 19:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 commentsFeb 24, 18:00

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
Feb 24, 16:002026-02-24 16:00:00 UTC2026-02-24 17:00:00 UTC110
Feb 24, 17:002026-02-24 17:00:00 UTC2026-02-24 18:00:00 UTC000
Feb 24, 18:002026-02-24 18:00:00 UTC2026-02-24 19:00:00 UTC101

What Hacker News says

2 sources
MrTravisB·Feb 24, 2026Submission

Show HN: Pilo – open-source agentic web automation engine by Mozilla

Hello HN, We are the team behind Tabstack (https://tabstack.ai) - part of Mozilla. We just open sourced Pilo (pronounce PIE-low), the core engine that powers our automation platform. You can check it out on Github at https://github.com/mozilla/pilo. Pilo is an agentic web automation library. Instead of writing rigid scripts with CSS selectors, you give it a natural language goal (e.g., "Find the best pizza in Seattle and extract the ratings") and it autonomously navigates the browser to achieve it. We built this because we were struggling to make reliable agents for our own /automate endpoint. Existing tools were either too brittle (breaking on minor DOM changes) or too heavy (feeding raw HTML to LLMs, blowing up context windows). Here is how Pilo solves those problems: - Accessibility Tree over HTML: Instead of parsing raw HTML "soup," P
Read the rest
ilo captures the browser's accessibility tree (via Playwright's _snapshotForAI). This gives the LLM a semantic, stable view of the page (buttons, links, inputs) rather than div hell. - Context Compression: We pipe that tree through a compression engine. We map verbose tags (like listitem -> li), shorten reference IDs, and deduplicate repetitive text. This reduces token usage by 60-80% without losing interactive elements, allowing for much longer agent loops. - Layered Error Handling: The web is flaky. Pilo treats navigation failures as distinct from interaction failures. It uses timeout escalation for network issues (doubling wait times) and will automatically restart the browser instance if it detects a "stuck" state or DNS failure. - Agentic Loop: It follows a strict Plan -> Observe -> Act -> Validate loop. It even includes a separate validation step where a second LLM "grades" the final output against the original success criteria before returning it. The "Cool" Part (Browser Extension) Since the core logic is decoupled from the runtime, we packaged it into a browser extension. You can install it, type a prompt, and literally watch the agent drive your local browser tab in real-time. It’s a great way to debug how the LLM "sees" the page. Why Open Source? We sell the managed infrastructure (scaling browsers, persistent sessions, etc.) at Tabstack. But the execution engine itself, the thing that decides "click here" or "scroll there", should be open. You can run Pilo entirely on your own machine with your own API keys without paying us a dime. You can read more about it on our blog https://tabstack.ai/blog/introducing-pilo-browser-automation. Or check out the repo, install it, and give it a try - https://github.com/mozilla/pilo We’d love to hear your feedback on the compression pipeline or how you’re handling agent state in your own projects. Happy to answer any questions!
18 points · Open discussion

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