We made Playwright 2x faster and 80% more token efficient

Re:We made Playwright 2x faster and 80% more token efficient by cl685 on Friday September 18, 2026 @12:48PM (#49756970)

lowk why not just do astra computer use

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Re:We made Playwright 2x faster and 80% more token efficient by smpandya on Friday September 18, 2026 @01:05PM (#49757207)

I tried this myself - my conclusion was the overhead of parsing a screenshot, generating an action, and being limited to headful mode is much less efficient than reading accessibility trees & generating CDP commands.

basically, browser automation is a closer-to-the-metal abstraction than computer use, allows more flexibility, and ends up being much cheaper at scale!

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Re:We made Playwright 2x faster and 80% more token efficient by vishalanton on Friday September 18, 2026 @01:06PM (#49757217)

Astra with computer use seems to burn a ton of tokens though. Stagehand seems more token efficient.

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Re:We made Playwright 2x faster and 80% more token efficient by ChemSpider on Saturday September 19, 2026 @07:43AM (#49765724)

If agents need to run on the desktop or logged into a user's real browser, the alternative would be Ui.Vision MCP. But stagehand is designed for backend use, so apples and oranges.

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Re:We made Playwright 2x faster and 80% more token efficient by polski-g on Saturday September 19, 2026 @08:51AM (#49766173)

Money?

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