Let agents fill out web forms using text-grid page rendering
Author built TextWeb, a text-grid browser so LLM agents can fill out job applications without costly vision models.
Done with a custom-built or unnamed agent
- What they did
- The author built TextWeb, which loads a page in headless Chromium and pulls out each visible element's position, text, and whether it's interactive. It maps these onto a character grid that keeps the on-screen layout. Interactive elements get numbers, so an agent issues commands like click 3 or type 7 followed by text. Any LLM can read it.
- How it went
- Each page comes out as roughly 2-5KB of text instead of a roughly 1MB screenshot, so no vision model is needed. The post gives no results from actual job applications and asks for feedback on the grid format.
- Worth knowing
- It installs with npm install -g textweb and plugs in through an MCP server, function-calling definitions, LangChain, CrewAI, an HTTP API, a CLI, or a Node.js library.
Try it yourself with Claude Code
Write a small tool that renders a web page as a text grid, listing each form field, button, and link with a reference number, so an LLM agent can fill out forms without screenshots. Test it on [job application or form URL] using placeholder data and show me the filled fields. Never submit the form.
Source: HN · Feb 19, 2026
Five of these in your inbox every morning
The best things people got an AI agent to do, each with the prompt to try it.
More like this
- GitHub Copilot
Run a solo company with eight agent departments
A founder set up CEO, CFO, COO, lawyer, accountant, marketing, CTO, and improver agents that share memory and consult each other.
Revise courses from student evaluation feedback
A professor had Claude Code summarize course-evaluation PDFs, filed themes as GitHub issues, and used agents to revise his security course and two others.
Reconcile bank statements with invoices
Cowork cleaned vendor names, categorized expenses, matched invoices to transactions, flagged missing ones, built an Excel file and renamed invoice files.
Turn Notion PRDs into scoped Linear tickets
Devin's docs describe reading a Notion PRD to create Linear tickets, producing implementation plans for a backlog, and posting customer health summaries to Slack.
- Custom agent
Contact job candidates for initial HR screening
A job seeker reports an AI agent calling and emailing them for a first HR screening.
Learn personal scripts from a tools folder
Claude Cowork read a folder of personal scripts for email, CRM, research and drafting, added them to memory, and carried the capabilities to a new interface.