Posted by alexblackwell_ 5 hours ago
Demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_PeostC-b4. Many people spend hours per day in legacy dashboards and on-prem solutions reconciling data across platforms. Current attempts at automation use browser automations or computer use agents which are brittle, slow, and nondeterministic. I come from a web reverse engineering background and spent the last 7-8 years building integrations by hand for sneaker/ticket releases, sportsbooks logins, and everything in\ between. During that time I consulted for several companies and brought them off of browser based infrastructure into the requests layer.
When we started Zatanna (that’s our company name) we worked in dental tech, which meant we had to deal with tons of insurance payer dashboards and legacy dental-practice solutions. Our superpower (as a fairly undifferentiated voice agent/front desk assistant company) was that we could integrate with nearly any system requested. During this time we built extensive tooling (including what we’re now calling Kampala) to allow us to spin up these integrations quickly. Existing MITM proxies and tooling didn’t work for a few reasons: (1) They manipulated the TLS and HTTP2 fingerprint over the wire which was detected by strict anti-bots. (2) They had bad MCPs which did not adequately expose necessary features like scripts/replay. (3) They did not allow for building workflows or actions given a sample or sequence of requests.
As the tools we built got more powerful, we began to use them internally to scrape conference attendees, connect to external PMS systems, and interact with slack apps. I even sent it to my property manager mom, who (with a lot of help from me lol), automated 2-3 hours of billing information entry in Yardi. At that point we realized that this wasn’t really about dentistry :)
Because Kampala is a MITM, it is able to leverage existing session tokens/anti-bot cookies and automate things deterministically in seconds. You can either use our agent harness that directly creates scripts/apis by prompting you with what actions to make, or our MCP by manually doing a workflow once, and asking your preferred coding agent to use Kampala to make a script/API to replicate it. Once you have an API/script, you can export, run, or even have us host it for you.
We think the future of automation does not consist of sending screenshots of webpages to LLMs, but instead using the layer below that computers actually understand. Excited to hear your thoughts/questions/feedback!
We opened chrome, navigated the entire website, the downloaded the network tab as an har file. The asked claude to analyze and document the apis as an openapi json. Worked amazing.
Next step - we wrote a small python script. On one side, this script implements stdio mcp. On the other side, it calls the Internal apis exposed by the 3rd party app. Only thing missing is the auth headers..
This is the best part. When claude connects to the mcp, the mcp launches a playwright controlled browser and opens the target web apication. It detects if the user is logged in. Then it extracts the auth credentials using playwright, saves them to a local cache file and closes the browser. Then it accesses the apis directly - no browser needed thereafter.
In about an hour worth of tokens with claude, we get a mcp server that works locally with each users credentials in a fairly reliable manner. We have been able to get this working in otherwise locked down corporate environments.
Takes very little time and tokens and I get to plug into their platform in seconds.
side note, YC25/YC26 batches have multiple startups that blantly violate ToS and sitting on a timebomb just pending a lawsuite and Cease and Desist Letters.
I do have to push back on the ToS comments though. Automation is used daily by nearly all companies. RPA is a billion dollar industry. Browserbase raised at 300M valuation. Is using puppeteer to automate a form submission a violation of ToS? If so then why is using a screen reader not? Is it the intention? Why is hitting network requests directly different? I personally don't think that automation is unethical (as long as it is not affecting server capacity). I don't think the answer to the ethical problems in scraping is just not to automate at all. Open to disagreement here though.
Without taking a position on the ethics of automation, surely this isn't a serious question? Things that the ToS prohibits you from doing are ToS violations, and other things aren't.
For instance, from AirBnb's terms of service: "Do not use bots, crawlers, scrapers, or other automated means to access or collect data or other content from or otherwise interact with the Airbnb Platform."
There is no similar prohibition against using screen readers.
and if API is not published, and you MITM with self-compromised CAs, and then use it (commercially?) you ~100% breaking ToS.
this is just un-ethical. or YC does not have regard anymore for such things?
There is nothing unethical about this. You can technically do this with a browser and its dev tools.
You being here is far more unethical than this app.
Ehh…
I've tested it against YouTube, Twitch, Ticketmaster, and Yahoo Finance. It will detect any transport like JSON, WebSocket, GraphQL, SSE, Protbuf, UDP, WebRTC, ect.. It after 3 hours and some coaching succeeded in reverse engineering ChatGPT + Cloudflare Turnstile but I didn't merge that into it yet.
It works by Claude using the Chrome DevTools Protocol (CDP) intercepting all traffic.
[0] https://github.com/adam-s/intercept?tab=readme-ov-file#how-i...
You are welcome to send me an email at [my_username]@gmail.com if you want to talk about some of these things that I'm working on that are in your space.
`intercept` is just a proof-of-concept and at this point, if it added any value to what you are working on, that would be the best. Overall, people are pounding every website and your product will save billions in compute from AI inference to servers grinding and grinding getting pounded by these bots.
I think just downloading all network traffic and giving it to claude code is the fastest and cheapest approach for 99% use cases.
Seems like a great product, potentially quite powerful for automated testing of SPAs.
If a web property has implemented anti-bot mechanisms, what ethical reasons do you have for providing evasion as a service?
How do you handle SSL pinning ? Most of the apps I interact with have some sort of SSL pinning, which is the hard part to circumvent. I tried Kampala but got stuck at the usual place; as soon as I enable it, chatGPT stops working. Most of my iPhone apps stop responding etc.
I would love to try using this tool to build an agent that can simply subscribe me to my gym lessons instead of me having to go on the horrible app. But even that relatively simple (iOS) app stopped working as soon as I enabled the proxy.
I also think mitmproxy (open source) has an option to spin up a virtual Android device that can bypass pinning via AVD. I have not tested how reliable it is though.
FWIW, it could also be a cert trust issue. I would try a quick Safari search to confirm the cert is fully trusted. ChatGPT is pinned, but the gym app makes me think it might be a trust or config issue on your device.
Happy to take a look as well. Email me at alex at zatanna dot ai.
Totally unrelated, I am just curious about why you chose the name, as someone who is Ugandan and was born in raised in Kampala (which is the Capital City of Uganda BTW).
Congratulations again.
If I’d make a mobile app and users simply use your automation service instead of my mobile app, I’d lose traffic/money/motivation to improve it.
If they run into issues from your service now it could make my app look bad while the error isn’t with the app.
See tailwind for an example tale.