Case study
On-Device Browser and Terminal Control for AI Agents
Built a control layer that lets an AI agent drive a user's own browser and terminal directly on their device — not a sandboxed clone — so automation acts within the exact session, login, and permissions the user already has, supporting the broader Automation Platform.
Overview
Agents needed to complete tasks that only existed inside a person's actual browser session or terminal — a site they were already logged into, a local dev environment — not a disconnected sandbox that would need its own login and setup.
The Challenge
Running automation in a separate sandboxed browser or VM means re-authenticating everything and losing access to whatever local state or session the user already had — a dealbreaker for tasks that depend on a real, already-logged-in session or a specific local environment.
The business impact:
- Sandboxed automation environments meant re-logging into every site and losing local context.
- Long-running terminal tasks had no way to stream live output back to whoever needed to see them.
- A device losing connection mid-task had no clean way to resume, so progress was lost.
Approach
How do you let an agent act inside a session the user is already logged into?
Automation in a separate sandbox meant losing every login and piece of local state. We built a browser-control agent that connects directly to the user's own device over a live socket connection, so it drives the actual browser session already in use, not a disconnected clone.
How do you run terminal commands on the user's own machine, safely?
Terminal tasks needed to run in the user's real local environment, not a generic remote shell. We built a terminal-control agent with its own planner for simple and complex command sequences, executing directly on the connected device and streaming output back over a live session in real time.
How do you keep a long-running task alive if the connection drops?
A dropped connection shouldn't mean losing a task's progress. We built device-scoped session tracking and reconnection handling, so a terminal or browser task resumes on the same device instead of restarting from zero.
How do you make terminal output trustworthy, not just raw text?
Raw terminal output isn't safe for an agent to reason over directly. We built a structured result layer that validates and normalizes terminal output into a verifiable result, so downstream steps act on confirmed outcomes, not unparsed text.
Tech Stack
Outcome
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