Spegel
Dev tools
terminal browser
SHOW HN2025
How HN took it
20 positive, 40 neutral or asking, 4 mixed, 24 critical, out of 88 comments about the project. Thread score +0.02.
Idea: 16 for, 6 againstExecution: 1 for, 14 againstPerformance: 2 for, 3 againstPrivacy: 0 for, 1 against
The thread, comment by comment
Each row is a top-level comment and its replies, in HN's order. Select a cell to open that comment on HN.
positive neutral or mixed critical about another commenter or something else the maker
What HN said
What people liked
Clever idea for cleaning up web pages and avoiding SEO clutter
From 2 comments
I definitely like the LLM in the middle, it’s a nice way to circumvent the SEO machine and how Google has optimized writing in recent years. Removing all the cruft from a recipe…
mromanuk on HNThis is a terrific idea and could also have a lot of value with regards to accessibility.
ohadron on HN
Useful for terminal browsing and low-memory use
From 2 comments
Great project, much less memory than opening a web page in a browser.
gvison on HNCould work great with emacs' eww!
pepperonipboy on HN
Objections
Recipe rewrite hallucinated and changed ingredients
From 2 comments
Which it apparently does by completely changing the recipe in random places including ingredients and amounts thereof. It is _indeed_ a very good microcosm of what LLMs are, just…
andrepd on HNChanges Spegel made to the linked recipe's ingredients: Pounds of lamb become kilograms (more than doubling the quantity of meat), a medium onion turns large, one celery stalk…
mossTechnician on HN
Costly in energy and tokens compared to deterministic parsing
From 2 comments
Cool idea! but kind of wasteful.. I just feel wrong if I waste energy.. At least you could first turn it into markdown with a library that preserves semantic web structures (I…
leroman on HNCongrats! Now you need an entire datacenter to visualize a web page.
fzaninotto on HN
Does not handle JavaScript-heavy sites
From 2 comments
I've thought about getting a web browser to work on the terminal for a while now. This is an idea that hadn't occured to me yet and I'm intrigued. But I feel it doesn't solve the…
hambes on HNThe main problem with these approaches is that most sites now are useless without JS or having access to the accessibility tree. Projects like browser-use or other DOM based…
deepdarkforest on HN
Requests
Support scripting, post requests and authenticated pages
From 3 comments
Would really love to see more functionality built into this. Handling post requests, enabling scripting, etc could all be super powerful
wrsh07 on HNAny chance it would work for pages like Facebook or LinkedIn? I would love to have a distraction-free way of searching information there. Obviously, against wishes of these…
stared on HNThis is great! Another useful amendment to this that would make me use it add a chrome browser tool to allow access to pages that need authn and then scrape them for you. My #1…
ghm2180 on HN
Convert HTML to markdown before sending to the LLM
From 2 comments
Why not use pandoc to convert html to markdown and have the LLM condense from there?
hyperific on HNCool idea! but kind of wasteful.. I just feel wrong if I waste energy.. At least you could first turn it into markdown with a library that preserves semantic web structures (I…
leroman on HN
Questions
Does it handle Cloudflare captchas?
From 1 comment
Does it fail cloudflare captcha?
neocodesoftware on HN
Can it strip ads?
From 1 comment
Can it strip ads?
amelius on HN
Alternatives named
Browsh
From 1 comment
I think the project itself is really cool, that said I really don't like the trend of having LLMs regurgitate content back to us. That said, this kinda makes me think of Browsh,…
nartho on HN
Recipe Filter Chrome extension and schema.org Recipe markup
From 2 comments
There are extensions that do that for you, in a deterministic way and not relying on LLMs. For example, Recipe Filter for chrome. It just shows a pop up over the page when it…
IncreasePosts on HNAnother great example of LLM hype train re-inventing something that already existed [1] (and was actually thought out) but making it worse and non-deterministic in the worst ways…
lpribis on HN