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Comment by nozzlegear | Hacker News Reader

> I’ve heard executive leaders tout that “people use agents to buy things for them” but I haven’t actually seen that.

My wife really dislikes building up the shopping cart for our weekly grocery delivery, so I built an agent... thing with earendil's npm libs. It takes the menu my wife has decided on, confers with her about the ingredients (if it hasn't seen a recipe before), and then uses Chrome's devtools protocol to head to Walmart and add everything to the shopping cart.

It works fairly well and uses the local models I have running on my Mac Studio.

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> uses the local models

That is fantastic. Last I checked models capable of running on commodity (anything below a dedicated GPU rack) hardware were very lackluster.

Yeah, they're excellent. I use a small Qwen3-4B-Instruct as the "actor" agent which goes out to the website, searches for a batch of items, decides which best matches the criteria, and puts them in the cart. Then I have Qwen3.6-35B-A3B as the "orchestrator" agent (it's just what I use for my daily driver), it's responsible for chatting with my wife about the menu, recipes and ingredients, and tells the smaller agent what to put in the cart with our brand preferences, dietary restrictions, etc. in mind.

I could probably drop the smaller Qwen at this point, but when I was first building this I was having an issue with search results and cart data filling up the main agent's context.

Does walmart keep prompting you with "Press and hold" anti bot requests? I have a similar project and keep getting these on walmart.

Nope! Not even once, which surprised me. We've done about 6 grocery runs with it now, and it's never been blocked by any anti-bot detection. Maybe it's because I'm signed into my Walmart account already, or because it's using Chrome's devtools protocol to control the browser instead of something like Puppeteer?

it's trivial to detect vanilla CDP sessions.

There's many parameters in calculating a risk profile including having a residential IP number. I think you have that.

playwriter.dev will reuse your existing session or cookies I really like it over cdp when its stuff i need done from my regular chrome profile (you can also make separate profiles on chrome so the agent uses only that or smt like that)

I'm not exactly sure but playwriter highly likely will pollute the global name space of your existing session.

I was going to say that I'm using Apple's iCloud VPN, but I don't think Chrome actually uses that on Mac. I think you're right, it's probably my residential IP.

You being authenticated is probably the big helper, yes.

Very interesting!

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