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 5

fzaninotto 7/1/2025|

Congrats! Now you need an entire datacenter to visualize a web page.

juujian 7/1/2025||

Couldn't this time reasonably well on a local machine is you have some kind of neutral processing chip and enough ram? Conversion to MD shouldn't require a huge model.

busssard 7/1/2025||

only if you use an API and not a dedicated distill/tune for html to MD conversion.

But the question of Javascript remains

098799 7/1/2025||

You could also use headless selenium under the hood and pipe to the model the entire Dom of the document after the JavaScript was loaded. Of course it would make it much slower but also would amend the main worry people have which is many websites will flat out not show anything in the initial GET request.

busssard 7/1/2025|

can you flesh this out a tiny bit? because for indy-crawlers the javascript rendering is the main problem.

098799 7/1/2025||

Here's a sketch: https://chatgpt.com/share/68640b97-9a48-8007-a27c-fdf85ff412... -- selenium drives your actual browser under the hood.

amelius 7/1/2025||

Can it strip ads?

tossandthrow 7/1/2025|

It can inject its own!

amelius 7/1/2025||

You have a point as it uses Gemini under the hood. However, the moment Google introduces ads in the model users will run away. So Google really has no opportunity here to inject ads.

And wouldn't it be ironic if Gemini was used to strip ads from webpages?

tossandthrow 7/1/2025||

The field of "seo for Ai", ie, seeking to have your company featured in LLMs, is already established.

In the rare cases where the model would jam on its own, this will likely already happen.

herval 7/2/2025||

We’re back to the BBS days, 30 years later!

nicklo 7/1/2025||

Have you considered making an MCP for this? Would be great for use in vibe-coding

remram 7/2/2025||

Not to be confused with Kubernetes' Spiegel: https://spegel.dev/ https://github.com/spegel-org/spegel

Klaster_1 7/1/2025||

Now that's a user agent!

CaptainFever 7/1/2025|

Finally, web browsers work for the user, not the website owners!

revskill 7/1/2025||

Use uv instead of pip

b0a04gl 7/1/2025||

this is another layer of abstraction on top of an already broken system. you're running html through an llm to get markdown that gets rendered in a terminal browser. that's like... three format conversions just to read text. the original web had simple html that was readable in any terminal browser already. now they arent designed as documents anymore but rather designed as applications that happen to deliver some content as a side effect

MangoToupe 7/1/2025||

That's the world we live in. You can either not have access to content or you must accept abstractions to remove all the bad decisions browser vendors have forced on us the last 30 years to support ad-browsing.

worldsayshi 7/1/2025|||

If the web site is a SPA that is hydrated using an API it would be conceivable that the LLM can build a reusable interface around the API while taking inspiration from the original page. That interface can then be stored in some cache.

I'm not saying it's necessarily a good idea but perhaps a bad/fun idea that can inspire good ideas?

jrm4 7/1/2025|||

I 100% agree -- but still I find this a feature and not a bug. It's always an arms race, and I like this shot fired.

_joel 7/1/2025|||

> this is another layer of abstraction on top of an already broken system

pretty much like all modern computing then, hey.

nashashmi 7/1/2025|||

Think of it as a secretary that is transforming and formatting information. You may desire for the original medium to be something like what you want but you don’t get that so you can get a cheap dumber secretary instead.

amelius 7/1/2025|||

I take it you never use "Reader mode" in your browser?

ktpsns 7/1/2025|

Reminds me of https://www.brow.sh/ which is not AI related at all but just a very powerful terminal browser which in fact supports JS, even videos.

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