50 Lines of TypeScript to Automate Any Website with AI

Most AI browser automation tools fall into two camps: vision-based (screenshot the page, send it to a model, get click coordinates) or selector-based (CSS/XPath targeting). Both have fundamental problems. Vision is slow and expensive — every action requires a screenshot round-trip to a vision model. Selectors are brittle and meaningless to an LLM — div.container > ul > li:nth-child(3) > a tells the AI nothing about what it's clicking. There's a third approach: text snapshots with numbered refs . The browser's accessibility tree is already a structured, semantic representation of the page. Give it to the AI as text, let the AI pick a ref, execute the action. No vision, no selectors, deterministic targeting. Here's a complete AI browser agent using browserclaw and Claude: import Anthropic from " @anthropic-ai/sdk " ; import { BrowserClaw } from " browserclaw " ; const anthropic = new Anthropic (); const SYSTEM = `You are a browser automation agent. You receive a text snapshot of a web pa