Yet another Hacker News

We made Playwright 2x faster and 80% more token efficient

33 points wittydeveloper 5 hours ago 14 comments

wittydeveloper 5 hours ago | parent

We built Stagehand 2 years ago (24k stars and 4M monthly npm downloads) and recently fixed its biggest flaw: round-trip latency.

Every action performed requires a round trip between your script and the browser (short when running locally but increased when running in the cloud). We also saw multiple posts complaining about the eager token appetite of Playwright MCP.

For this reason, we rebuilt Stagehand from the ground up and shipped v4, where Stagehand controls the browser from an extension automatically loaded upon your browser startup.

Stagehand v4 comes with batch command support, dedicated token-efficient methods `act()` and `extract()`, and a brand new architecture making it 2x faster than Playwright and 80% more token efficient.

You can see for yourself by looking at our benchmarks, comparing its performance across a dozen models (frontier and open weights) and tools (Codex, Claude Code, and more): https://www.stagehand.dev/evals

Ask me anything!

cl685 5 hours ago | parent

what did you lose compared to CDP (e.g. cross-origin iframes, downloads running in envs where you can't load extensions)?

wittydeveloper 5 hours ago | parent

It still uses CDP but communicates from an extension within the browser instead of a script running in a separate runtime or, worse, in a separate region.

cl685 5 hours ago | parent

lowk why not just do astra computer use

smpandya 5 hours ago | parent

I tried this myself - my conclusion was the overhead of parsing a screenshot, generating an action, and being limited to headful mode is much less efficient than reading accessibility trees & generating CDP commands.

basically, browser automation is a closer-to-the-metal abstraction than computer use, allows more flexibility, and ends up being much cheaper at scale!

vishalanton 5 hours ago | parent

Astra with computer use seems to burn a ton of tokens though. Stagehand seems more token efficient.

alyssamaru 5 hours ago | parent

How much does the harness really matter for evals?

wittydeveloper 5 hours ago | parent

A lot, especially for performance. That's why we built our own benchmarks that account for both the model and the harness. For example, with Claude Opus 5, the accuracy gap can be up to 3% and performance up to 200ms, depending on whether you're using Deep Agents, Eve, or Fx.

More details here: https://www.stagehand.dev/evals

vishalanton 5 hours ago | parent

So for an enterprise with a 1,000 test Playwright suite, does this basically mean ~2x faster CI times? That would be huge.

wittydeveloper 4 hours ago | parent

Exactly, as Stagehand now runs inside the browser, you'll save on the round trip. Also, enabling batch actions will further accelerate your test suite.

dot_louis 5 hours ago | parent

Do I need to pay for Browserbase to use this?

wittydeveloper 4 hours ago | parent

Nope, Stagehand is open-source and works with local browsers by default.

ishankunam 4 hours ago | parent

seems really cool! although, one question i have is why not keep agent() alongside the new primatives? it seems v4 removed agent() entirely rather than offering it with all of act(), observe(), extract().

wittydeveloper 4 hours ago | parent

We removed agent because so many great harnesses are available in the ecosystem. Instead of keeping it, we decided to make Stagehand v4 better integrated with popular harnesses, both at the Coding Agent level (Codex, Claude Code) and frameworks level (Eve, Deep Agents, Mastra, etc)