If you look at Elixir keynote for Phoenix.new -- a cool agentic coding tool -- you'll see some hints about a browser control using a API tool call. It's called "web" in the video.
Cool to see lots of people independently come to "CLIs are all you need". I'm still not sure if it's a short-term bandaid because agents are so good at terminal use or if it's part of a longer term trend but it's definitely felt much more seamless to me then MCPs.
A background daemon holds the session state between different CLI calls. This daemon is started automatically on the first webctl call and auto-closes after a timeout period of inactivity to save resources.
The main difference is likely the targeting philosophy. webctl relies heavily on ARIA roles/semantics (e.g. role=button name="Save") rather than injected IDs or CSS selectors. I find this makes the automation much more robust to UI changes.
Also, I went with Python for V1 simply for iteration speed and ecosystem integration. I'd love to rewrite in Rust eventually, but Python was the most efficient way to get a stable tool working for my specific use case.
I don't have an objective benchmark yet. I tried several existing solutions, especially the MCP servers for browser automation, and none of them were able to reproducibly solve my specific task.
An objective benchmark is a great idea, especially to compare webctl against other similar CLI-based tools. I'll definitely look into how to set that up.
Video: https://youtu.be/ojL_VHc4gLk?t=2132
More discussion: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Jun/23/phoenix-new/
(my one of many contribution https://github.com/caesarnine/binsmith)
https://github.com/rumca-js/crawler-buddy
More like a framework for other mechanisms
How is it different?
The main difference is likely the targeting philosophy. webctl relies heavily on ARIA roles/semantics (e.g. role=button name="Save") rather than injected IDs or CSS selectors. I find this makes the automation much more robust to UI changes.
Also, I went with Python for V1 simply for iteration speed and ecosystem integration. I'd love to rewrite in Rust eventually, but Python was the most efficient way to get a stable tool working for my specific use case.
"browser automation for ai agents" is a popular idea these days.
An objective benchmark is a great idea, especially to compare webctl against other similar CLI-based tools. I'll definitely look into how to set that up.