Hey everyone,
I’ve been working a lot with browser automation recently — everything from scraping dynamic pages to automating form submissions across multiple accounts. While tools like Puppeteer or the Playwright node offer a lot of power, they also come with a familiar pain: XPath hell.
You know the drill:
- The selector works… until it doesn’t.
- Your script breaks when the site changes its layout by a pixel.
- Even with good XPath/CSS knowledge, debugging complex click flows is a nightmare.
So I started thinking:
What if we could control browsers using natural language — and let AI do the heavy lifting?
Prompt-Based Browser Automation — How It Works
I recently experimented with a setup that combines:
n8nfor orchestrationHidemium(an antidetect browser with scripting capabilities)GPTorClaudefor instruction interpretation via Prompt Scripts
Here’s the basic idea:
- In n8n, you define a prompt as a plain instruction, like:
- “Go to example…, click on the ‘Login’ button, fill in the email field with test@test…, then click Submit.”
- This prompt is sent via HTTP Request to the browser session (running locally or via cloud), where the AI agent parses it and:
- Navigates to the page
- Interacts with DOM elements using context, not selectors
- Handles delays, captcha, scrolling, or waits automatically
- n8n then continues the flow — maybe parsing cookies, saving session tokens, or logging the outcome to Notion or Google Sheets.
What Makes This Different?
Unlike the typical click("#btn-login") or waitForSelector(".form-group input"), a prompt-driven model abstracts away the complexity of DOM traversal.
And more importantly:
- You don’t need to write or maintain fragile selectors
- You can outsource reasoning to GPT or Claude, which is surprisingly good at understanding what “click the blue button under the price” means
- It becomes modular and readable — every step is just a sentence
Real-Life Use Cases
Here are a few ways I’ve been using this in combination with n8n:
- Bulk Account Login: Feed n8n a list of accounts, then have the browser login automatically using prompts — no need to inspect element.
- Airdrop Participation: Loop through campaign URLs and complete simple on-page actions like wallet connect, claim, or retweet.
- Form Automation: Auto-fill and submit onboarding forms for beta test platforms with dynamic layouts.
- QA Testing: Automatically simulate user actions on staging sites, without needing a QA engineer to inspect and record new selectors every week.
Potential for n8n Native Integration?
Would love to ask the community (and maybe the n8n team):
Would it make sense to build a “Prompt-Controlled Browser” node, that lets users pass plain-language instructions to an attached headless browser instance?
This would combine the low-code power of n8n with the contextual reasoning of LLMs — potentially bridging the gap between traditional scripting and real human-like interaction.
Current Limitations
Of course, there are still tradeoffs:
- Prompt-based agents are slower than direct scripts (they “think” more, but click slower).
- Not ideal for pixel-perfect automation or scraping thousands of records quickly.
- Requires a bit of setup to connect n8n with a local or cloud browser agent that supports prompt input (Hidemium is one such tool, but others could work too).
But for complex interactions on modern web UIs, it removes a huge amount of friction.
What Do You Think?
- Have you tried anything similar — like integrating ChatGPT with Puppeteer flows?
- Would a no-code prompt-driven browser node be useful for your workflow?
- What blockers do you see for this approach?
Happy to share more technical details or even draft a small demo flow if anyone’s curious!
