I was reading the blog post about bot detection with browsers. The first layer being the IP address of the browser.
One rather unique scenario I've been trying to work out for a scraper is eliminating network latency. My use of the site is enhanced by the request from the browser having the lowest RTT latency to the webserver as possible. This means being in the same cloud provider.
To do this right now I manually navigate to the site and have a browser extension that clicks at just the right time.
I'd really like to eliminate that manual navigation but every time I've tried adding browser automation outside of the single click from the extension, I'm immediately met with bot detection.
Obviously adding a residential proxy step completely defeats the purpose of the RTT latency optimization.
Do modified browsers drive the overall bot detection heuristic low enough that the cloud IP address itself isn't a red flag? I've seen Camoufox and will try it at some point. What other options are available to drive down the overall "score" so I can still automate the browser but keep the latency low?
> I've tried adding browser automation outside of the single click from the extension, and I'm immediately met with bot detection.
Can you explain how you write your automation? How do you do the click from the extension? Do you use CDP input commands to perform the click (`Input.dispatchMouseEvent`), or do you execute JS code and click the button using `element.click`? using CDP will give you much better score than Executing JS to click a captcha button. JS Execution can be easily detected by any bot detection provider. On the other hand, using CDP to click can mimic actual mouse movement and will make it much harder to detect abnormalities. and the click event will have `isTrusted=true` and handle detection methods related to monitoring JS executions on page.
> Do modified browsers drive the overall bot detection heuristic low enough that the cloud IP address itself isn't a red flag? I've seen Camoufox and will try it at some point. What other options are available to drive down the overall "score" so I can still automate the browser but keep the latency low?
Modified browsers reduce your bot score a lot, and Camoufox is a great option to test out. Will it work? It depends on how the website has set up their bot detection. using modified browser is a must for use case.
At Intuned, we use our own internal forked Chrome to hide the most popular signals, and a lot of the time, the browser alone without a residential proxy can help us bypass most websites, but not all of them(IP reputation has very high heuristic value).
I can't give exact recommendation on what will work with you for sure since each website has it's own ways to handle bot detection , one recommendation I can give is to try to use packages like patchright they can help alot and hide alot of popular signals.
Another recommendation I can make is to try using intuned agent and ask it to help you find a way to bypass bot detection on that website. If you can handle it using network interception or some other scraping technique, the agent is really good in these cases and knows most of the used scraping techniques.
I feel that you'll end up being an automation agency (you mentioned UiPath), companies who have the skills and capacity to build, will not need your service. But those who want the full service, you might fill a gap.
I wish you all the best.
Based on your YC page, you went through a couple of pivots over the last years:
- 4 years ago: Intuned - The data assistant for engineering leaders [0]
- 2 years ago: Intuned - The browser automation platform for developers and product teams [1]
- 1 year ago: Intuned Auth Sessions - Build authenticated scrapers and RPA [2]
What was kind of the evolution from YC S22 4 years ago till you arrived at today's launch? How did you find your differentiation in a highly commoditized space? Even within YC, there are many competitors like Firecrawl, Reworkd, BrowserUse, NotteLabs, Browserbase, etc.
Another thing that might interest HN: AI crawlers come with negative side effects for website owners (costs, downtime, etc.), as repeatedly reported here on HN (and experienced myself).
Does Intuned respect robots.txt directives and do you disclose the identity of your crawlers via user-agent header?
[0] https://www.ycombinator.com/launches/Gqr-intuned-the-data-as...
[1]https://www.ycombinator.com/launches/LGE-intuned-the-browser...
[2] https://www.ycombinator.com/launches/Lpq-intuned-auth-sessio...
Also, one of our engineers did a write up on bot detection systems and how they work - https://intunedhq.com/blog/how-bot-detection-works
Also, imagine that you have a case where you want to scrape 10,000 records from a website, why have AI navigate to every page to do this? why not write the code, run it, and get consistent and fast result? its also predictable, if it messes up, you know what happened and you can trace it to the exact line of code.
For your question about how is this different - I think if you dig into those product you will see that our focus is different, many of the companies mentioned are focused on powering agents via APIs, some are focused on enabling users to use AI at runtime, we do feel that our product is somewhat differentiated - the closest one is possibly Reworkd and I would still say the product is somewhat different. Now, the hardest part is actually commenting this with customers and the market in general - and there, we have a lot to figure out!
For robots.txt and user-agents question, we think of ourselves as providing infrastructure and flexibility for our customers to do what they want - we do encourage in our docs that they respect robots.txt but we don't enforce it on a platform level.
Appreciate you taking the time to leave this comment - very thoughtful
If a customer, doesn't want to use playwright, they don't have to given CDP but we most of our templates use playwright.
Intuned as a platform to deploy browser automation adds a lot - anti-bot detection, jobs, observability and more.
On your automation, your tool fed back to me as follows after 3 submissions:
> The CAPTCHA is persistently blocking now — Prosopo's widget appears to have flagged the session/IP due to the repeated submissions. The checkbox won't reset this time. This is expected behavior from their bot protection product. To submit again, you'd likely need to wait a while for the rate limit to clear, or submit manually from your own browser.
for jobs/durability/obs i have sqlite and had codex generate an ugly but functional dashboard
im just curious to know what intune does that is different
We are actually working on open sourcing a plugin that you can use with any coding harness!
I am happy to give you a demo over a call as well
Describe what you need. Intuned Agent builds production-ready Playwright code, deploys it, and fixes it when sites change. You get the reliability of code without writing it yourself.
Intuned Agent
Describe what you need. The agent builds it, fixes it, and keeps it running.
Describe what you need — a scraper, RPA workflow, crawler, or any automation — and the agent builds it as production-ready code.
Describe the change. The agent edits the code, validates against the live site, and delivers a diff you can review.
apple-careers
Jobsjobs.apple.com
Deployed
What would you like to edit?
Update this to get only US Jobs
One click from a failed run. The agent reads the error, analyzes traces, and writes a fix.
Platform Features
Everything you need to run browser automations in production. Built in, not bolted on.
Write create.ts and check.ts (or .py), we handle the rest—validating, reusing, and recreating sessions automatically.
Stealth mode, automatic captcha solving, and proxy support built in. Run automations without getting blocked.
Local development with full control. CI/CD ready, team collaboration, version control.
Full logs, traces, and session recordings for every run. See what happened and why.
Traces
Logs
Errors
History
Runs
Metrics
Records
JobRuns
Recordings
Single execution via API. Set max concurrent requests, we queue the rest. Built for RPA and integrations.
Scheduled, batched execution. Control how many machines to run on. Built for scrapers and crawlers.
Testimonials
Blog
Default Intuned project template for browser automation Github
starterintuned-browser-sdkTypeScript
Default AuthSession Intuned project template for browser automation Github
starterintuned-browser-sdkauth-sessionsTypeScript
Authentication example using email-based OTP verification with Resend Github
auth-sessions2faTypeScript
Authentication example using secret-based OTP verification Github
auth-sessions2faTypeScript
Showcase of Intuned Browser SDK helper functions for common automation tasks Github
intuned-browser-sdkTypeScript
E-commerce scraper with captcha solving and auth sessions Github
captchaauth-sessionsTypeScript