Tasker
An open-source desktop agent for browser and OS automation
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Hi HNI recently got married, promptly had a bit of a meltdown, and decided to lock myself in a room and build for a while.At the same time, I was trying to outbound sell for my startup and kept running into the same problem: I wanted an automation tool that could actually use my computer like a person. Click through UIs, copy/paste between apps, handle messy workflows — not just APIs and webhooks.I couldn’t find anything that felt: - consumer-friendly (non-technical) - local-first - flexible enough for real-world, UI-driven tasksSo I challenged myself to see how far I could get building an open-source, desktop automation app powered by AI. That’s Tasker.I’ve been using it daily for ~2–3 weeks for sales workflows, and my father has been using it to help generate estimates for his HVAC business. It’s still early (still needs to expand to general OS), but it’s already replaced a lot of manual work for us in browser.One thing that’s become very clear: a cloud/deployable version that can run on cron or be triggered via HTTP would unlock a lot of use cases. I’m not totally sure where this goes next, but I wanted to share it early and get feedback.Would love thoughts on: - What workflows you’d actually trust something like this with - Desktop vs cloud tradeoffs - Where this breaks down in practice - Whether this feels useful or just scaryRepo and docs are linked on the site.
HN · launched Jan 1, 2026 · 33 upvotes (top 27%) · 0 views
Niche: computer and browser automation agents · 127 launches, 0 in the last 7 days ▼ -100% · Explore this niche →
Category and tags
- Horizontal
- Agent / copilot
- Prosumer
- AI-native
- Hobby / open-source project
Visit website ↗ Source listing ↗
More like this: all 127 launches in computer and browser automation agents →
Could you build this?
Partial A basic UI with browser automation (Playwright/Puppeteer) is vibe-codeable, but reliable cross-platform desktop OS automation using vision and computer-use agents is notoriously brittle and complex.
What it would actually take: Typically an Electron or Tauri desktop shell coordinating Playwright for browser tasks and OS-level accessibility APIs / screen capture / mouse-keyboard hooks (e.g., RobotJS or PyAutoGUI). The hard part is reliable multimodal computer-use agent execution: interpreting screen state across arbitrary monitor resolutions/OS window states and recovering from failures, requiring AI agent evaluation harnesses and native desktop system integrations.
Discussion
20 comments analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: Tasker (Android automation app)
Concerns raised: Doesn't record specific actions like website visits, text clicks, copying, Privacy concerns when running locally, Confusion with existing Tasker app on Android, Gap between planned workflows and actual execution behavior, Potential filesystem/OS API errors with irreversible effects
Feature requests: Run automation in separate session/screen so user can continue working, Self-hosted/own server deployment option, Configuration-based sandboxing and allowlisting without code changes, Improve task recording accuracy for specific web interactions
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one : 518 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #173 of 519 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 64 days after the earliest competitor.
- Mozilla.ai introduces Clawbolt, an AI Assistant for the trades · hn · 2026-03-03 · 12 upvotes · similarity 0.52
- I spent 3 months making desktop automation stop lying to AI agents · hn · 2026-08-15 · 6 upvotes · similarity 0.52
- Computer Agents · hn · 2026-03-01 · 7 upvotes · similarity 0.50
- AutoCua · github · 2026-10-08 · 16 upvotes · similarity 0.49
- Reverse-engineering web apps into agent tools · hn · 2026-07-09 · 96 upvotes · similarity 0.47
- PageAgent, A GUI agent that lives inside your web app · hn · 2026-03-05 · 147 upvotes · similarity 0.46
- Simulation of a desktop app I built on the web · hn · 2025-11-11 · 11 upvotes · similarity 0.46
- The agent that builds and operates its own SaaS tools · hn · 2026-06-09 · 11 upvotes · similarity 0.46
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