Stagehand — AI-Powered Browser Automation SDK

What it is

Stagehand is a TypeScript SDK that lets you automate browsers using natural language and visual understanding. Instead of writing CSS selectors or XPath queries, you describe what you want in plain English and Stagehand's AI figures out how to interact with the page. It is built on Playwright, so you get the reliability of a mature browser automation framework with AI-powered element selection.

Stagehand is designed for developers building web scrapers, test automation, or browser-based workflows who want to reduce the fragility of selector-based automation.

How it saves time or tokens

Traditional browser automation breaks when websites change their HTML structure, CSS classes, or DOM hierarchy. Stagehand's AI-based element selection is resilient to these changes because it understands the visual layout and semantic meaning of page elements. A test that says 'click the login button' works regardless of whether the button's class name changes. This reduces maintenance time and the cost of keeping automation scripts up to date.

How to use

1. Install Stagehand:

npm install @browserbasehq/stagehand

1. Create an automation script:

import { Stagehand } from '@browserbasehq/stagehand';

const stagehand = new Stagehand({ env: 'LOCAL' });
await stagehand.init();
await stagehand.page.goto('https://news.ycombinator.com');

// AI-powered actions
await stagehand.act({ action: 'click the first article link' });
const title = await stagehand.extract({
  instruction: 'extract the article title',
  schema: { type: 'object', properties: { title: { type: 'string' } } },
});
console.log(title);

1. Run your script with Node.js or integrate it into your test suite.

Example

A web scraping workflow that extracts product data:

import { Stagehand } from '@browserbasehq/stagehand';

const stagehand = new Stagehand({ env: 'LOCAL' });
await stagehand.init();
await stagehand.page.goto('https://example-store.com/products');

const products = await stagehand.extract({
  instruction: 'extract all product names, prices, and ratings from the page',
  schema: {
    type: 'array',
    items: {
      type: 'object',
      properties: {
        name: { type: 'string' },
        price: { type: 'string' },
        rating: { type: 'number' },
      },
    },
  },
});

console.log(JSON.stringify(products, null, 2));
await stagehand.close();

Related on TokRepo

• Browser automation tools — Browse AI-powered browser tools
• Web scraping tools — Explore web data extraction tools

Common pitfalls

• Using Stagehand for tasks where simple selectors work fine. AI-based selection adds latency and API costs. Use traditional Playwright selectors for stable, well-known page structures and Stagehand for dynamic or frequently changing pages.
• Not handling authentication cookies. For pages behind login, handle authentication in a traditional Playwright step before using Stagehand's AI features.
• Expecting 100% accuracy on complex pages. AI-based element selection is probabilistic. Add assertions and error handling to catch cases where the AI selects the wrong element.