u/PresidentToad

There's a thread here every few weeks about browser agents — usually ending with some version of "real but expensive and still maturing." I've shared that view too. But I think the cost and reliability problems are partly an architectural mismatch rather than just the category being early.

The pattern I keep seeing: agent + headless Chrome + AI layer stacked on top. The browser controls pages; the AI layer tries to figure out what the pages mean. Those two things are disconnected. The agent burns tokens narrating its way back into context on every hop because the browser doesn't carry any understanding between steps.

I've been testing a different configuration. Opera Neon has a CLI now — opera-browser-cli — that exposes the browser's native AI agents (Do, Make, Research) as terminal commands. The AI is inside the browser, not bolted on top of it. When you call it from an external orchestrator, you're not calling a page controller that needs a separate model to interpret the output. You're calling something that already knows what it's looking at.

Practically: headless mode, runs locally, binds to a port, and the output that comes back to your orchestration layer is actually usable without a cleanup step. Token overhead is lower than the Playwright-plus-model-plus-prompt stack I was running before.

This doesn't solve everything. Anti-bot layers are still messy regardless of your architecture. And you're dependent on having an active Neon session, which limits purely serverless use cases. But the failure modes are different — and more recoverable — when the browser understands what it's doing rather than just reporting what it saw.

Anyone else approaching it this way? What's your browser layer when the task genuinely requires understanding the page rather than parsing it?

Saw a thread a while back asking for Comet alternatives and BrowserOS kept coming up as the answer. Wanted to share a different experience since my use case might overlap with others here.

I needed an agentic browser that I could call from existing automation scripts, not one I had to sit inside and operate manually. That ruled out most options pretty quickly — the ones with polished interfaces generally assume you're a human using them interactively, and wiring them into a script feels like working against the design.

What I settled on is Opera Neon, specifically because it shipped a CLI last week: opera-browser-cli. The install is npm install -g opera-browser-cli && opera-browser-cli setup if you want to try it. It runs locally, headless mode works, and it exposes the browser's AI agents (research, task execution) as terminal commands — not just raw page control like you'd get from a Playwright wrapper.

For the kind of workflows I run in this sub's territory — multi-step automations that need to cross authenticated sites, grab structured output, and pass it downstream — the CLI is the part that matters. My Python scripts call it the same way they'd call any other local command. No GUI dependency, no watching a browser window, just a clean handoff.

BrowserOS is still the right answer if you want open-source and full control over the stack. This is more the answer if you want the AI interpretation layer already built in and you'd rather not rebuild it yourself.

Happy to share more specifics on the setup if useful — there's also a community around Neon that's been pretty helpful when I've run into edge cases.

A year ago I stumbled on some Image2 3D generators and started making game assets. At the same time I'd worked with Bezi, which was just released by then. So I took this old idea for a VR game I had lying around and then I made a 2D version of it using essentially everything AI-generated and vibe-coded. I remember being so enthusiastic and essentially blown away by the marvelous thing I had created. Not only the 3D assets but the promo videos, the Steam page assets, and creating it all using Unity without knowing how to use Unity.

I felt like king of the world. I felt absolutely invincible. I was so proud of my creation.

Today the rest of the world has kept up and my game, being early, can immediately be identified as AI-generated in every respect. And man alive, it's cringy to look at it. But still I feel happy I created it. I'm proud that I actually went all the way and took a game from my mind into reality, essentially by myself. That was and still is a good feeling.

I truly believe that the future of game development is essentially to sit in front of your computer and talk to it, bringing into reality whatever is in your head as you describe it. I for one welcome that future as long as the tools are good enough to really portray what's in your imagination.