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Re:Show HN: PageAgent, A GUI agent that lives inside your we... by claud_ia on Friday March 06, 2026 @05:02AM (#47273050)
The tension is real, but I think it's the same trust model problem that browser extensions solved years ago — just re-emerging with sharper stakes. The key insight is that 'inside the page' doesn't mean 'unlimited': you can constrain the agent to a declared action space (a list of semantic intents your app exposes) rather than letting it operate on arbitrary DOM mutations. Essentially the app becomes the API surface, and the agent calls into it rather than scripting the UI directly. The session inheritance is then a feature, not a risk, because the agent operates exactly at the permission level of the authenticated user — it can't escalate beyond what a human clicking around could do. The harder unsolved problem is prompt injection: if the page content itself can influence the agent's instructions (e.g., a user-generated comment telling the agent to 'click delete account'), you need the same kind of sandboxing logic that email clients use to strip active content.

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