January 28, 2026
Tabs just hired an AI intern
Show HN: Cursor for Userscripts
AI sidekick rewires your webpages; devs cheer, rivals sprint, olds yell “we did this first”
TLDR: A new browser add-on lets an AI edit and automate web pages, saving scripts that auto-run when you return. Commenters split between excitement (finally no copy-paste dance), clone-race drama, cost pleas for “free” Gemini keys, and veterans yelling “Coscripter did this in 2007”—but everyone wants it to work.
A scrappy new extension called Browser Code just dropped an AI “coding agent” straight into your browser, promising to read and rewrite pages, run scripts, and remember tweaks for next time. The crowd reaction? Chaos, cheers, and chartreuse-level drama. Esophagus4, sick of the copy‑paste shuffle with Claude, celebrated that the bot finally lives where the action is: the page itself. Another voice, _false, praised the grounded approach—no “AI God,” just edits to the page’s bones (the DOM, aka the page’s structure). Even the creator’s self‑own—“heavily vibe coded, keep expectations low”—turned into a meme.
Then the race began. Rival dev Akranazon slid in with “so you got ahead of me,” linking their own contender, QuillMonkey. It’s officially a sprint to own the “AI userscript” crown. Meanwhile, budget panic erupted as rahimnathwani begged for Google’s Gemini Flash support using “free” keys to avoid surprise bills. And the historians arrived: cxr dropped a vintage Coscripter link from 2007, reminding everyone we’ve been here before. Bonus hassle: Chrome needs a special toggle for locked‑down sites like LinkedIn—because of course it does. Verdict: half the thread is hype, half is “seen it”, and 100% of commenters want the cheapest, fastest AI that actually works.
Key Points
- •Browser Code is a browser extension that exposes web pages as a virtual filesystem for an AI agent to read, edit, and automate.
- •It supports creating/executing JavaScript, injecting CSS, and saving per-site scripts that auto-run on revisit.
- •Installation involves building with bun and loading unpacked (Chrome MV3) or temporary (Firefox MV2) extensions, with specific permissions for CSP sites.
- •The agent provides tools like Read, Edit, Write, Glob, Grep, GrepCount, Bash, and Ls, with version tracking to prevent conflicts.
- •Limitations include strict CSP and Trusted Types on some sites; Chrome’s userScripts API must be enabled to run scripts on such sites.