📍 Currently in Mexico building a browser for the AI era. 💬 Prev: Versa, language learning with AI 🤝 Let's talk tech, travels and making cool things.
Joined March 2020
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I built the first-ever protocol for browser-website collaboration. Let me explain:
The way we browse the web hasn’t really changed in over a decade.
On one side, we have browsers. They have historically been made to show us and letting us interact with pages, not to understand them. Up until now,, they've been pretty passive.
On the other side, we have websites. They’ve actually evolved a lot: from static HTML in the 90s, to interactive sites in the 2000s, to full web apps today.
But lately things have changed massively: Now we have browsers that can do stuff on the websites on our behalf. Atlas, Comet, Dia, Cleo. They can plan, reason, and execute.
And suddenly, browser-website communication matters more than ever. If browsers can act, they need to truly understand the sites they visit.
❌ The problem? Every current attempt at letting browsers take action on a website, is brittle. It relies on AI guessing what a site means or can do. There’s still no native way for browsers to talk to websites. There’s no bridge, no way for them to cooperate.
Until now.
🌅 Introducing ASTRAL
ASTRAL is a new standard: a protocol that lets websites natively talk to browsers. A bridge for browsers and websites to finally work together.
It’s a lightweight capability layer that lets websites describe what they can do, and browsers understand, reason, and act inside the site, with their permission.
When you open a site, the browser instantly knows its purpose and capabilities. It adds those to its toolkit. And when it’s time to act, it does so within the site’s rules.
The site defines what’s possible.
The browser decides when and how to use it.
We’re building a new era of the internet. One that feels natural, where browsers and websites speak the same language.
With the ASTRAL protocol, the browser can finally understands the sites it visits, can adapt its ui to you, can collaborate not just with one website, but with multiple.
This unlocks a whole new layer of user-web interaction. It’s a massive step towards an internet that’s semantic, dynamic, personal, and human.
This is my biggest launch up to date, and I'm excited to see where this goes.
➡️ I'm inviting early builders to try this with me. If you're shipping web apps, AI-native products, or just love breaking the web open in new ways, reach out.
(Here's a 5 min demo using the Cleo browser on ASTRAL-enabled mock sites)
pablooomvc retweeted
the input interface has been the same for decades.
with ai, software can now reason and act on your behalf but the interface is the bottleneck.
why do i have to check sushi on 10 restaurants across 3 apps? why can't i just do it with a flick of a finger?!
the world's about to get a new interface @agi_interfaces
URLs are the new apps.
Sounds clickbait-y, but think about it.
A website that exposes tools to an AI browser / AI agent, that allows it to interact with the site safely, natively, robustly... is no different than a plugin/app.
This is massive. Websites can expose their services to agents/browsers, so they can seamlessly interact with them, whether alongside a human user or not.
That's what Astral is. It's a standarized, simple, and safe way to make websites not only agent-ready, but also ai-browser-ready. Websites expose tools (not api routes, but actual functions) to the agent/browser, so it can safely interact with them.
A huge step towards an agentic web.
teapawt.net/_pabloomvc/status/1985…
I built the first-ever protocol for browser-website collaboration. Let me explain:
The way we browse the web hasn’t really changed in over a decade.
On one side, we have browsers. They have historically been made to show us and letting us interact with pages, not to understand them. Up until now,, they've been pretty passive.
On the other side, we have websites. They’ve actually evolved a lot: from static HTML in the 90s, to interactive sites in the 2000s, to full web apps today.
But lately things have changed massively: Now we have browsers that can do stuff on the websites on our behalf. Atlas, Comet, Dia, Cleo. They can plan, reason, and execute.
And suddenly, browser-website communication matters more than ever. If browsers can act, they need to truly understand the sites they visit.
❌ The problem? Every current attempt at letting browsers take action on a website, is brittle. It relies on AI guessing what a site means or can do. There’s still no native way for browsers to talk to websites. There’s no bridge, no way for them to cooperate.
Until now.
🌅 Introducing ASTRAL
ASTRAL is a new standard: a protocol that lets websites natively talk to browsers. A bridge for browsers and websites to finally work together.
It’s a lightweight capability layer that lets websites describe what they can do, and browsers understand, reason, and act inside the site, with their permission.
When you open a site, the browser instantly knows its purpose and capabilities. It adds those to its toolkit. And when it’s time to act, it does so within the site’s rules.
The site defines what’s possible.
The browser decides when and how to use it.
We’re building a new era of the internet. One that feels natural, where browsers and websites speak the same language.
With the ASTRAL protocol, the browser can finally understands the sites it visits, can adapt its ui to you, can collaborate not just with one website, but with multiple.
This unlocks a whole new layer of user-web interaction. It’s a massive step towards an internet that’s semantic, dynamic, personal, and human.
This is my biggest launch up to date, and I'm excited to see where this goes.
➡️ I'm inviting early builders to try this with me. If you're shipping web apps, AI-native products, or just love breaking the web open in new ways, reach out.
(Here's a 5 min demo using the Cleo browser on ASTRAL-enabled mock sites)
Anyone can build a business around an existing problem.
It takes a real entrepreneur to build a business around a problem that doesn’t even exist.
Cloudflare holds the entire internet together.
But it takes just one day off, and the whole internet is like
Even Cloudflare breaks in prod.
And here I am overthinking my product launch because it might be buggy
AI browsers are currently unable to truly understand the sites they visit.
They can only see the surface. They work based on messy DOM and screenshots. They can't access the underlying business logic.
As AI clients/AI browsers grow in popularity, a layer that allows them to communicate & cooperate with a website becomes increasingly important.
🌅 So I built that layer and I called it Astral.
With Astral:
• A website can expose tools & metadata to the browser.
• An AI browser can use this tools safely and natively. All execution happens on the website, by its rules and limitations.
A website with a well-done Astral implementation, basically becomes an app that an AI browser/agent can interact with.
Here's a 3-min demo showing what would it be like if a site like Canva used the protocol.
I'm currently looking for devs to implement Astral and start building the first use cases, DM if you wanna try it/learn more!
@ycombinator
Astral SDK is finished. Now time to do some testing and making sure it all works well before launching.
Soon, devs will be able to implement Astral on their sites, to have them expose tools & metadata to AI browsers like Cleo.
The browser can then invoke these tools and act on the website natively. Tool execution happens on the site, according to its rules and limitations.
Pretty cool stuff if you ask me.
For something like Astral, the web protocol I’ve been building, adoption is everything.
And after a few 1–1 calls with developers, I realized that implementing Astral manually is still too complicated; too many moving parts.
So I’m fixing that.
I’m packaging everything into an SDK that any dev can drop into their project to expose Astral tools and metadata with almost no setup.
From there, an AI browser like Cleo can pick them up, and run actions directly on the site. Fast, safe, native.
Astral adds a new layer to the web. One where websites and AI browsers can actually talk to each other and cooperate.
That layer doesn’t exist today so I’m building the tooling that makes it accessible.
Development-wise, the SDK is the priority now, so expect it soon 🙌
If you wanna know how it works, link to the launch tweet in the comments 👇
I built the first-ever protocol for browser-website collaboration. Let me explain:
The way we browse the web hasn’t really changed in over a decade.
On one side, we have browsers. They have historically been made to show us and letting us interact with pages, not to understand them. Up until now,, they've been pretty passive.
On the other side, we have websites. They’ve actually evolved a lot: from static HTML in the 90s, to interactive sites in the 2000s, to full web apps today.
But lately things have changed massively: Now we have browsers that can do stuff on the websites on our behalf. Atlas, Comet, Dia, Cleo. They can plan, reason, and execute.
And suddenly, browser-website communication matters more than ever. If browsers can act, they need to truly understand the sites they visit.
❌ The problem? Every current attempt at letting browsers take action on a website, is brittle. It relies on AI guessing what a site means or can do. There’s still no native way for browsers to talk to websites. There’s no bridge, no way for them to cooperate.
Until now.
🌅 Introducing ASTRAL
ASTRAL is a new standard: a protocol that lets websites natively talk to browsers. A bridge for browsers and websites to finally work together.
It’s a lightweight capability layer that lets websites describe what they can do, and browsers understand, reason, and act inside the site, with their permission.
When you open a site, the browser instantly knows its purpose and capabilities. It adds those to its toolkit. And when it’s time to act, it does so within the site’s rules.
The site defines what’s possible.
The browser decides when and how to use it.
We’re building a new era of the internet. One that feels natural, where browsers and websites speak the same language.
With the ASTRAL protocol, the browser can finally understands the sites it visits, can adapt its ui to you, can collaborate not just with one website, but with multiple.
This unlocks a whole new layer of user-web interaction. It’s a massive step towards an internet that’s semantic, dynamic, personal, and human.
This is my biggest launch up to date, and I'm excited to see where this goes.
➡️ I'm inviting early builders to try this with me. If you're shipping web apps, AI-native products, or just love breaking the web open in new ways, reach out.
(Here's a 5 min demo using the Cleo browser on ASTRAL-enabled mock sites)
Met with @Muddhit who’s building a pretty advanced Canva-style editor.
He’s been trying to add AI/automation on top: Playwright, Atlas, Comet, other “browser-use” setups. They work but they’re fragile/slow. They either work on messy selectors that lack semantic meaning, chaotic DOM trees, or taking screenshots.
So we talked about how the Astral protocol can help.
☀ Astral is a simple protocol where a website/app explicitly exposes tools & metadata to the browser. The browser then decides when and how to use these tools. The execution happens on the webiste, according to its rules and specs. Astral lets websites and browsers cooperate, instead of making the browser guess.
From the convo, I learned that:
• The Astral approach works great and is ready for apps of this complexity.
• Cleo (the AI browser I built) needs a stronger agent architecture if it’s going to interact with Astral sites of this level of complexity. So that’s what I’ll be doing this week.
Crazy how these conversations are starting to sound more and more real.
@ycombinator
Coding is one thing
But distribution is a whole different game.
Sometimes it’s hard to take off the techie hat and put on the growth hat.
I developed a protocol for website–browser communication. It’s the first of its kind and unlocks a whole new layer of interaction with the web. It’s called Astral.
Until now, browsers have mostly guessed what a site can do. Astral changes that.
It allows AI browsers to ✨natively✨ understand the websites they visit. The site exposes tools and metadata to the browser, and the browser includes them in its thought process.
No more brittle automations, no more behind-the-scenes workflows, all execution happens directly on the site and can even update the UI in real time.
It's like the website exposing an API for the browser to consume.
▶️ If you’re building something cool, join the first wave of devs implementing Astral and shaping this new layer of the web. We’ll work together 1-on-1 to implement it in your project, and create new and intuitive ux's.
More info + link to apply below