What is stagehand?

Stagehand is a framework for automating web browsers, meaning it lets a program open a browser, click things, fill in forms, and read information from pages, without a human doing it by hand. What makes it different from older automation tools like Selenium, Playwright, or Puppeteer is that it lets a developer mix two approaches: writing exact code for the parts of a task you already understand well, and using plain English instructions for the parts where the page layout is unfamiliar or might change. According to the README, this matters because purely code-based automation tends to break the moment a website's design changes, while purely AI-driven automation agents can be unpredictable when used in a real production system. Stagehand tries to sit between the two. You can preview what an AI-driven action will do before actually running it, and Stagehand can remember and cache actions it has already figured out, so it does not need to call an AI model every single time the same step runs. If the website changes and a cached action stops working, Stagehand notices and falls back to using AI again to figure out the new way to do it. Developers get three main building blocks: an act function for telling the browser to perform a single action described in plain language, an agent function for handing off a multi-step task like navigating to a specific pull request, and an extract function for pulling structured, labeled data out of a page, such as a PR's author and title. Getting started can be as simple as running one command to scaffold a new project, or you can clone the repository directly, install dependencies with pnpm, and build it from source. To actually run automations, you need an API key from an AI model provider and credentials from Browserbase, the company behind this project, since Stagehand relies on their cloud browser infrastructure alongside the AI model. The project is open source under the MIT license and has an active Discord community for support and contributions, with contributors credited by name in the README.