Let agents fill out web forms using text-grid page rendering
A published walkthrough shows the builder assembled TextWeb, which loads a page in headless Chromium and pulls out each visible element's position, text, and whether it's interactive. It maps these onto a character grid that keeps the on-screen layout. Each page comes out as roughly 2-5KB of text instead of a roughly 1MB screenshot, so no vision model is needed.
- Agent or tool
- Custom agent
- Topic
- Productivity
- Reported on
- Hacker News
- Added
- 2026-10-15
Why it matters
Small, repetitive tasks eat more of the week than anyone likes to admit. Cases like this show an agent taking a chore off someone's plate end to end, not just suggesting what to do. It is one of 196 sightings filed under Productivity on Agent Sightings (number 142 by interest), and one of 182 involving Custom agent.
How you could try it
Here is a reusable prompt, written by us in our own words, that captures the task. Paste it into your own agent or any similar agent and adjust the details to your situation.
Help me let agents fill out web forms using text-grid page rendering. Break it into steps, show your work, and wait for confirmation before anything irreversible, paid, or outbound.
Tip: Start small: run it once on a low-stakes example, read what the agent did, and only then let it run on real work.
Source
Read the original first-hand account on Hacker News: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47073885. Our summary is a paraphrase; details are in the source.