Mantis releases an MCP tool for browsing web pages as numbered text
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Perzian releases Mantis, which converts web pages into numbered short text rather than screenshots for AI agents to browse. It can be integrated as an MCP server into Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, or self-built agents, and installation requires two commands. Mantis is currently a small v0.1.x beta. Login and bot verification walls require calling ask_human, and that feature depends on a monitor. canvas, WebGL, maps, and drawing applications are only described as canvas, with no coordinate clicking or drawing tools, so this type of input cannot be performed. The tool is released under the MIT license.
AI overview based on source reports · Updated 35 min ago
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- Hacker News AIShow HN: Mantis – AI agents browse 36% faster than with Playwright MCP
Mantis is an MCP server that lets AI agents browse the web as short, numbered text instead of screenshots, and works with Claude Code, Codex, Cursor or custom agents. In the author's benchmarks against Playwright MCP's accessibility tree, long tasks used 29-47% fewer input tokens, 29-37% fewer calls and about a third less time, while short tasks used 35-57% fewer input tokens with equal or better accuracy. Limitations include no canvas input, login and bot walls requiring ask_human with a display, and benchmarking only on read, navigate and form-fill tasks with two models.
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