🧠 Open Comet


Inspiration

Modern AI agents can generate text—but they struggle with real-world execution on the web. Tasks like research, form filling, or multi-step workflows often break due to dynamic UIs, unreliable selectors, and lack of structured planning.

We were inspired to solve a core gap:

How can we build an AI agent that doesn’t just respond—but plans, verifies, and reliably executes tasks inside a real browser?

This led to Open Comet: a spec-driven autonomous browser agent designed for reliability, transparency, and privacy.


What it does

Open Comet is an AI-powered Chrome extension that turns high-level user intent into structured, executable web workflows.

It can:

  • Perform multi-step browsing tasks across websites
  • Run deep research loops across tabs and sources
  • Interact with web pages using visual + DOM understanding
  • Recover from failures using self-healing execution strategies

Unlike traditional agents, Open Comet:

  • Plans → verifies → executes instead of blindly acting
  • Uses multimodal grounding (DOM + screenshots)
  • Maintains a Zero-Data architecture (all sensitive data stays local)

How we built it

We followed a spec-driven development approach, where every task is converted into a structured execution pipeline before action.

🔧 Core Architecture

  • Intent → Spec Layer Converts user prompts into structured task graphs

  • Execution Engine Breaks tasks into atomic browser actions (click, type, navigate)

  • Multimodal Perception Layer Combines:

    • DOM parsing
    • Screenshot-based visual grounding
  • Verification Loop Confirms each step before proceeding (reduces hallucinated actions)

  • Self-Healing System Handles:

    • DOM changes
    • stale selectors
    • dynamic layouts
  • Model Abstraction Layer Supports multiple providers:

    • OpenAI
    • Anthropic
    • Google
    • Mistral AI
    • Ollama
  • Privacy Layer (Zero-Data Architecture) Ensures browsing data and history remain on-device


Challenges we ran into

  • Dynamic Web Environments Websites frequently change structure, breaking naive automation.

  • Reliable Element Detection Pure DOM-based approaches failed—required hybrid visual + structural grounding.

  • Agent Consistency Early prompt-based agents behaved unpredictably without structured specs.

  • Latency vs Accuracy Tradeoff Adding verification improved reliability but increased execution time.


Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • ✅ Built a fully working autonomous browser agent
  • ✅ Implemented spec-driven execution (not just prompt-based AI)
  • ✅ Designed a self-healing interaction system
  • ✅ Achieved high task success rate across dynamic websites
  • ✅ Created a privacy-first Zero-Data architecture
  • ✅ Enabled multi-model support (cloud + local LLMs)

What we learned

  • Spec-driven > prompt-driven for reliable AI systems
  • Multimodal grounding is essential for real-world execution
  • Verification loops drastically improve agent stability
  • Real-world environments expose edge cases not seen in controlled demos

This project shifted our mindset from:

“Ask AI to do things” → “Design systems that ensure AI does things correctly.”


What's next for Open Comet

  • 🔄 Advanced Planning Engine Hierarchical task decomposition and long-horizon workflows

  • 🧠 Learning-based Skill System Agents that improve from past executions

  • 🔍 Better Execution Trace Visualization Debugging and transparency tools for developers

  • 🌐 Cross-browser + OS-level automation Expanding beyond Chrome

  • 🔐 Stronger Security Layer Sandboxed execution and permission-aware actions


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