Show HN: Spegel, a Terminal Browser That Uses LLMs to Rewrite Webpages

Posted by simedw 7/1/2025

Show HN: Spegel, a Terminal Browser That Uses LLMs to Rewrite Webpages(simedw.com)

426 points | 180 commentspage 4

crest 7/2/2025|

A cool hack, but also impressive to come up with a CLI "browser" that's even more expensive to run than Chromium.

WD-42 7/1/2025||

Does anyone know why LLMs love emojis so much?

userbinator 7/1/2025|

Likely because it was trained on such material... which is just as authentic and vapid.

eevmanu 7/1/2025||

great POC

looks very similar to a chrome extension i use for a similar goal: reader view - https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/ecabifbgmdmgdllomnf...

web3aj 7/1/2025||

Very cool. I’ve been interested in browsing the web directly from my terminal; this feels accessible.

eniac111 7/1/2025||

Cool! It would be even better if it was able to create simple web pages for vintage browsers.

stronglikedan 7/1/2025|

That would violate the do-one-thing-and-do-it-well principle for no apparent benefit. There are plenty of tools to convert markdown to basic HTML already.

benrutter 7/1/2025||

Welcome to 2025 where it's more reasonable to filter all content through an LLM than to expect web developers to make use of the semantic web that's existed for more than a decade. . .

Serioisly though, looks like a novel fix for the problem that most terminal browsers face. Namely that terminals are text based, but the web, whilst it contains text, is often subdivided up in a way that only really makes sense graphically.

I wonder if a similar type of thing might work for screen readers or other accessibility features

insane_dreamer 7/1/2025||

Interesting, but why round-trip through an LLM just to convert HTML to Markdown?

markstos 7/1/2025||

Because the modern web isn't reliably HTML, it's "web apps" with heavy use of JavaScript and API calls. To first display the HTML that you see in your browser, you need a user agent that runs JavaScript and makes all the backend calls that Chrome would make to put together some HTML.

Some websites may still return some static upfront that could be usefully understood without JavaScript processing, but a lot don't.

That's not to say you need an LLM, there are projects like Puppeteer that are like headless browsers that can return the rendered HTML, which can then be sent through an HTML to Markdown filter. That would be less computationally intensive.

insane_dreamer 7/1/2025||

> That's not to say you need an LLM, ... then be sent through an HTML to Markdown filter. That would be less computationally intensive.

which was exactly my point

crent 7/1/2025||

Because this isn't just converting HTML to markdown. I'd recommend taking another look at the website and particularly read the recipe example as it demonstrates the goal of the project pretty well.

gvison 7/2/2025||

Great project, much less memory than opening a web page in a browser.

tartoran 7/1/2025||

Loving the text only browsing. Is this as fast as in the preview?

cout 7/1/2025|

This is a neat idea!

I wonder if it could be adapted to render as gopher pages.

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