Hello Hacker News! We’re Nas and Huss, co-founders of steel.dev (<a href="http://steel.dev" rel="nofollow">http://steel.dev</a>). Steel is an open-source browser API for AI agents and apps. We make it easy for AI devs to build browser automation into their products without getting flagged as a bot or worrying about browser infra.<p>over the last year or so, we’ve built quite a few AI apps that interact with the web and noticed - a. it was magical when you could get an llm to use the web and it worked and b. our browser infra was the source of 80% of our development time. Maintaining our browser infrastructure became its own engineering challenge - keeping browser pools healthy, managing session states and cookies, rotating proxies, handling CAPTCHA solving, and ensuring clean process termination. We got really good at running browser infrastructure at scale, but maintaining it was still stealing time away from building our actual products. So we wanted to build the product we wish we had.<p>Steel allows you to run any automation logic on our hosted instances of chromium. When you start a dedicated browser session you get stealth, proxies, and captcha solving out of the box. We do this by exposing websocket and http endpoints so you can connect to these instances with puppeteer, playwright, selenium(in beta), or raw CDP commands if you’re built like that.<p>Behind the scenes, we host several browser instances and route incoming connection requests to one of these instances. Our core design principle was to allow for every session to have its own dedicated browser instance + resources (currently 2gb vram and 2gb vcpu) while still allowing for quick session creation/connection times. Our first thought was to have separate nodes running in a Kubernetes cluster, but the cost of hosting warm browser instances would be expensive (which would be reflected in the pricing), and the boot times would be too slow to handle the scale that some customers required. We got around this by deploying our browser instance image on a firecracker VM, taking advantage of the lightning-fast boot times and ability to share a root FS.<p>Today, we’re open-sourcing the code for the steel browser instance, with plans to open-source the orchestration layer soon. With the open-source repo, you get backwards compatibility with our node/python SDKs, a lighter version of our session viewer, and most of the features that come with Steel Cloud. You can run this locally to test Steel out at an individual session level or one-click deploy to render/railway to run remotely.<p>We're really happy we get to show this to you all, thank you for reading about it! Please let us know your thoughts and questions in the comments.