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by suchintan·1y ago·view on hn ↗
You're making some really good points here

1/ the current prompt + payload structure is definitely on the complicated end of the spectrum, but we've found that we can use an LLM to help generate this payload for our users

The technical users want to learn more and generate their own payloads, and the non technical users prompt LLMs to help them generate the ultimate skyvern prompt to get going

This was very unexpected -- but a surprisingly logical chain of events.

Phase 1: build the thing the complex way (playwright) Phase 2: build the playwright thing with complex prompts (we are here right now) Phase 3: build the thing that builds the playwright thing with simpler prompts

Each phase lowers the technical bar to build your automations

2/ re: frequency of website changes

This IMO is a smaller value prop of LLM based automations. The biggest one is being able to handle highly dynamic situations. Consider the case where you're automating an e-commerce website where the popup offer changes every week. skyvern doesn't even notice those, but playwright scripts would break

Similarly, I love using the Geico example because it highlights something that was very difficult to automate before: The form changes every time you run it

Skyvern breezes through it.. but another case that was hard to automate before.

3/ data correctness

We're actually rolling out a workflows feature that allows you to chain multiple tasks together. The cool thing about this feature is that you can add steps in to have Skyvern self-validate it's own unless before continuing.

For example, you can add n products to cart, then navigate to the cart and validate the cart state

... As you can guess, this creates the foundation to have another agent go and use these tools to self-build workflows with simpler prompts

TL;DR -- we're on a pretty long journey to use LLMs to make BPA easier and easier, and this is just the first step