isoldex

Hi HN - author of Sentinel here.

I built Sentinel after using browser-use and Stagehand on a client project and hitting two recurring issues: flaky reliability on multi-step flows, and token costs that ate the budget on anything non-trivial. I suspected the root cause was architectural - both lean on the LLM re-reading large portions of the page each step - and tried Chrome's Accessibility Object Model (AOM) as the observation layer instead.

To check whether that architectural choice actually mattered, I built a 9-task benchmark comparing Sentinel, Stagehand, and browser-use against the same Gemini 3 Flash Preview model, same prompts, same programmatic validators, 5 runs per task-tool combo. Raw per-run JSON is committed so you can recompute or challenge every number.

Headline numbers: - Tokens: Sentinel uses 3.1x-56.9x fewer than browser-use, 1.4x-13.3x fewer than Stagehand. - Reliability: Sentinel 100% (45/45), browser-use 100% (45/45), Stagehand 86.7% (39/45). - Speed: Sentinel is fastest on 5 of 9 tasks. - The harder the task, the bigger the token gap.

Caveats up front: - I built Sentinel - treat this as a starting point for your own verification, not an impartial survey. README has a full known-limitations section. - Single model (Gemini 3 Flash Preview, which is also Stagehand's documented recommendation). - 9 tasks is small; raw JSON is there if you want to add tasks or rerun on a different model. - Each framework is used with its idiomatic API (Sentinel/Stagehand: discrete act()/extract(); browser-use: agent-loop prompt). Forcing them into the same call pattern would disadvantage whichever is optimized for the other.

Sentinel is already in production with paying clients (all self-hosted), which covers development costs. A managed offering is on the table if there's real demand: you'd pay infra + model usage at cost, no margin. Drop a comment if that would unblock you, otherwise I'd rather not maintain hosting nobody needs.

Serious question: what does Pyra do differently from uv? Both are Rust-based, both use pyproject.toml, both focus on determinism, and uv already owns mindshare here with Astral's funding behind it.

A "why not uv" section in the README would probably be the single highest-leverage thing you could add - otherwise every second commenter in this thread will ask the same question and the actual differentiator (if there is one) gets lost in noise

Spend caps exist for Gemini (Maxious linked them) - they just default to OFF. For an API that can bill four figures per hour, opt-in safety by default isn't a UX choice, it's a billing strategy