Show HN: An API for human-powered browser tasks

5 points by madebywelch 6 hours ago

At APM Help, we have a large team that performs repetitive, browser-based tasks. Years ago, to manage this work securely and get a clear audit trail, we built an internal platform we call "Hub." It's essentially a locked-down environment where our team works that records their sessions, tracks every interaction, and prevents data from being copied or shared. It's been our internal source of truth for years.

More recently, like many companies, we've been building more automation. And like everyone else, we've seen our automations fail on edge cases—a weirdly formatted invoice our parser can't read, a website layout change that breaks a scraper, etc. Our team would have to manually step in to fix these.

We realized other developers must have this exact same problem, but without a 250-person team on standby. So we connected our old, battle-tested Hub to a new, modern front door: a Human-in-the-Loop (HITL) API. We're calling it browser-work.com.

The idea is simple: when you hit a task that needs a human, you can send it to our team through the API.

Here's how it works:

  - You POST a request to our endpoint. The payload contains the context for the task (like a URL) and a set of instructions for the human on what to do.
  - The task appears in the Hub, where one of our trained operators can claim it.
  - They perform the task exactly as instructed, all within the secure Hub environment.
  - When they're done, we send a webhook to your system. The return payload includes the task's output, any notes left by the human, and a detailed log of their actions (e.g., DOM elements they interacted with).

The product is live and we're looking for people with interesting use cases.

I'm Robert, the CIO. If this sounds useful to you, send me a brief email about your use case at robert@apmhelp.com and we can get you started right away.

Happy to answer any questions here.