This week Cloudflare launched Kitesurf, a browser built specifically for AI agents. Written in Rust, runs on Workers, uses three to seven times less memory than Chromium. It's genuinely impressive.

You can't have it.

It's a hosted beta on Cloudflare's infrastructure. Their blog says they'll open source it "once we're ready -- hopefully soon." Maybe they will.

Meanwhile there's a repo that already does the job, has done for two years, and sits at 108,300 stars and 11,900 forks. MIT licensed. Two people, Magnus Muller and Gregor Zunic, Zurich and San Francisco.

It's called browser-use, and it's currently beating everybody.

The receipts

browser-use ranks #1 on the Odysseys leaderboard at 87.4% -- ahead of the computer-use agents from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and Microsoft. Odysseys measures 200 long-horizon web tasks, the kind that take an agent many steps and many pages.

Two people. Beating four of the largest companies on earth at their own benchmark.

And they published the benchmark harness as open source too, which is the part that makes me believe the number.

What it actually does

You describe a task in plain English and it drives a real browser -- opening pages, clicking, typing, filling forms.

The first example in their own README is this: "Fill in this job application with my resume and information."

Which is a strange coincidence, because the other repo I wrote up today is a job search agent. Two of the most-starred projects in open source right now are both, in part, about not having to fill in the same form for the sixtieth time.

Other things people point it at: extracting structured data off a page and dumping it to CSV, and QA-testing a site by describing bugs in English rather than writing selectors.

It plugs into whatever agent you're already using -- Claude Code, Codex, Cursor. One paste-in prompt sets it up.

What it replaces

The hosted-browser layer, which is one of the fastest-growing line items in AI tooling.

Browserbase runs $20 a month for the developer tier and $99 a month for the startup tier, plus $0.10 to $0.12 per browser hour once you're past the allowance, plus token costs on top through their gateway.

Go up the stack to traditional robotic process automation and it gets worse. UiPath starts at $25 a month for the basic self-serve plan, but the component pricing that enterprises actually pay runs roughly $420 per attended robot per year and $1,680 per unattended robot per year.

browser-use, open source, on your own machine: free.

Is it actually trending

108,300 stars and 11,900 forks. MIT. Actively developed.

Put that next to Kitesurf's zero, because Kitesurf doesn't have a repo yet.

The honest catch, and it's a real one

The free version is deliberately the weaker one. This isn't me speculating. Their own README lays out open source versus cloud and says the hosted agent is "much more powerful for complex tasks," recommends it, and puts a benchmark chart next to the claim. The company selling the paid tier is telling you the free tier is the lesser product. I respect them for saying it out loud, and you should plan around it.

You still pay for tokens. Free means free of licensing. Every task burns LLM calls against your own API key.

Reliability is the open question. In the creators' recent AMA, the sharpest question in the thread came from u/GimmeAdviceBitch: "When you say 'plain English automation instead of scripts,' what happens when the agent misreads the page and clicks the wrong thing? Is there a retry?" That's the right question, and it's the one that decides whether this is a toy or a tool.

I'll add my own: community discussion on browser-use is thinner than its star count suggests. Enormous adoption, comparatively quiet crowd. Read that however you like.

Why I'd deploy it

Because the alternative to owning this layer is renting it forever, and the rental market just got a new landlord this week.

Cloudflare's version will probably be excellent. It'll also run on their metal, on their terms, priced whenever they decide beta is over. browser-use runs on mine.

I'm installing this one. When I do, I'll write up the full stack -- what broke, what it cost per task in real tokens, and whether the open-source agent holds up on a job I actually care about. That write-up goes to paid subscribers.

Credits. browser-use is by Magnus Muller and Gregor Zunic. The Kitesurf contrast comes from Cloudflare's own launch post, which is worth reading in full -- they're unusually candid about the tradeoffs.

Sixty-nine applications.
Twenty first interviews.
One signed contract.

That's not a case study somebody paid for. That's the README.

Mads Lorentzen is a geophysicist with a PhD. His job got cut in late 2025. Instead of writing cover letters one at a time like the rest of us would, he built a job search framework on Claude Code and pointed it at his own career. In June 2026 he started as an AI engineer.

Then he published the whole thing. MIT license. Go take it.

Here's the part I can't stop thinking about. He told every single employer he was using it.

"I was upfront about it with every employer I spoke to, and instead of counting against me, it usually sparked a genuine technical conversation."

The thing you'd assume you have to hide is the thing that got him in the room.

What it actually does

Three commands do the heavy lifting.

/setup reads whatever you've got -- old CV, LinkedIn export, past applications -- and builds your profile.

/scrape searches job boards and ranks what it finds against that profile.

/apply is where it gets good. Feed it a posting. It scores your fit, writes a tailored CV and cover letter in LaTeX, then spins up a second Claude agent with a clean slate to research the company and rip the first draft apart. The drafter rewrites. Then it compiles the PDFs and looks at them, fixing the layout until the CV is exactly two pages with no job title stranded at the top of page three.

Last step: it pulls the text layer out of the PDF the way an applicant tracking system reads it, and scores keyword coverage against what a parser actually sees. Not what the page looks like. What the robot gets.

There's more past that. Interview prep built from the exact CV your interviewer read. A Gmail sync that watches for invites and rejections and updates your tracker on its own.

And one rule I'd frame on my wall: it won't lie for you. A keyword your background doesn't support gets flagged as a gap. It never gets stuffed into the CV. Interview gaps get honest bridge answers, never invented experience.

In a market where people are hiding white text in their resumes to trick the screener, somebody built the honest one and it's the one that's winning.

Why I want to run it

I'm looking at consulting work around AI implementation in the workforce, and I want to know how the market actually describes those roles. What titles they hide under. What they ask for. Where a decade of running a business plus two years of building AI systems lands on somebody else's scorecard.

That's a research question. This is a research tool that happens to point at hiring.

What it replaces

A professional resume writer runs about $200 entry level and $350 to $700 for executive work, per TopResume. Total spend usually lands somewhere between $200 and $1,000.

A career coach charges $75 to $200 an hour. Job search package, $300 to $1,000. Interview prep, another $150 to $600.

Those are prices for one CV and a handful of calls.

Mads made 69 tailored applications. Price that as human work and you're not looking at a few hundred dollars. You're looking at a number nobody who just lost their income can even consider.

This costs a Claude subscription and a weekend.

Is it actually trending

Yes. It hit #1 on GitHub Trending across every language on July 7, 2026. It's sitting at 30.7k stars.

But watch the forks: 11,300. Stars are a bookmark. Forking is how you use this thing -- you take a copy and fill it with your own history. Eleven thousand people did that.

The part that'll stop you

The setup is the real cost. Not the AI. The install.

Claude Code CLI, Python 3.10 or newer, Bun, and a full LaTeX distribution. LaTeX is the wall. If you've never installed it, block out an afternoon and expect at least one error message that means nothing to you.

Two more things. The job boards it ships with are Danish -- you get LinkedIn and freehire out of the box, or you run /add-portal to generate one for a board you actually use. And the repo is straight with you that automated LinkedIn access breaks their terms, so keep it personal and keep the volume low.

None of that is a reason to skip it. It's a reason to start Saturday morning instead of Tuesday night.

I'm installing this one. When I do, I'll write up the whole thing -- the stack, what broke, what the docs don't tell you, and what it actually surfaced about my own career. That write-up goes to paid subscribers.

Credits. Found this through Andrew Warner's The Next New Thing, which ran a hands-on walkthrough this week. Mads credits Mikkel Krogholm's skills repo for the job search CLI pieces.