Nothing like an AI to help you forget grocery shopping.
THIS IS HECKING INSANE! free gold for anyone who wants an OpenAI Dots-style agent but don’t want to pay for $200 subscription.
i found a repo with 2.4K stars in 3 days that gives you an open-source AI agent with its own browser. it runs on your machine and works with any model you want.
it's called dots, and the idea behind it is smarter than most agent projects i've seen this year.
here's the breakdown:
→ the insight that started it all. - most people think web agents fail because the model isn't smart enough. the author argues the opposite: the model is rarely the problem. the page never loaded, a challenge popped up, the login expired, the click didn't land. all of that happens in the browser, before the model even gets to think. so instead of chasing a better model, they rebuilt the browser.
→ a real browser engine, not a wrapper. - most agent tools drive Chrome through automation hooks and then try to hide those hooks with JavaScript patches. dots doesn't. it uses a real Firefox engine patched at the C++ level, so the browser's fingerprint is set inside the engine itself. there's nothing painted on top for a page to inspect.
→ one consistent identity. - screen size, fonts, GPU, timezone and language all match each other, like a real device would. pass the same seed and you get the exact same "person" on every run, so logins and sessions keep working instead of starting from zero each time.
→ nothing that screams "bot". - no WebDriver flag, no DevTools protocol, no automation globals sitting in the page. most automation stacks leak these signals by default.
→ it moves like a person. - the pointer actually travels to what it clicks, and keys are pressed one at a time. every event the page receives looks like it came from a real user.
→ the model is swappable. - you plug in an OpenRouter key and choose the model with one flag. today's best model, tomorrow's cheaper one, or an open-source one: the agent doesn't care, because the hard part lives in the browser.
→ setup is one command. - one uvx line on Windows or Linux, then open localhost in your browser. the conversation is on the left and the live browser is on the right, so you watch every click as it happens.
OpenAI ships Dots as a closed product inside a paid plan. this is open source, runs locally, and you own the whole stack.
i dig up repos like this every week before they hit the timeline. stay tuned so you catch the next one early, and show it to the friend who's still paying for agents they can't look inside.
so be honest: if the browser is the real bottleneck, are we wasting our time arguing over which model is best?