This was quite interesting. Well to begin, I wanted Claude to do stuff while I’m on the go with my laptop closed in my bag and I didn’t want to pay for a headless browser or run it on another machine. So yes, a ghost browser that exists purely as a stateless function. That was a bad decision, but what’s a bad decision if you can’t finish what you started? So I went down this rabbit hole… so you don’t have to. How I found this possible is what’s quite interesting because I’m definitely far from being a browser engineer, but with hours of research I decided to understand the anatomy of a browser and quickly realized that Ai doesn’t need a heavy GPU to execute on the web, deep dive on this below. So (I snapped my fingers and called all my Jarvis’- Claude and Gemini really) we stripped the paint layer of a browser, settled with happy DOM and thought yeah that was the product, while this was really difficult to piece together in itself, it meant almost half of the internet would be unreachable on such dogsh*t browser. Well let me not bore you with an act by act story. It eventually turned out to be something I don’t have a clean name for; a mathematical browser. It computes layout without painting, extracts React state without rendering, and reads APIs without touching the UI. Called it Hollow… you know… hollowed out the eyes. The name’s quite obvious i shouldn’t be explaining this. It uses Happy DOM for JS execution and Yoga (the React Native layout engine) for coordinate calculation. The insight that unlocked everything was that different sites expose their content differently. You don’t always need a DOM. So Hollow has 6 tiers:
- Hollow— Happy DOM + Yoga spatial layout
- VDOM — React Fiber tree extraction (intercept
REACT_DEVTOOLS_GLOBAL_HOOK, traverse Fiber tree, return component state) - Text — direct extraction for text-heavy pages
- Cache — Wayback Machine for WAF-blocked sites
- Mobile — iOS/Android API for Twitter/Reddit/Spotify
- Partial — graceful degradation, confidence score. Zero Chromium at every tier. Zero BaaS. Zero vendor dependency. I actually put it to action with an agent and Connected Claude as the agent this week. 15 steps, 4 concurrent browser tabs. Summarized HN comment thread, compared Reddit and HN simultaneously. Laptop closed the whole time. ~$0.00003 per task step. Benchmarking: 9/10 tasks completed, ~$0.056 per task including LLM costs. Browserbase alone would’ve cost me $0.05/minute before I paid for a single model call." What actually surprised me most was accepting that an AI doesn’t need to see a website to understand it. I had to keep this in my mind to keep me from drifting back to chromium. Well that’s it for now, there’s more to it in the repo. And if you’re also as determined, then give it a go: github.com/Badgerion/hollow You can also open it here for observability as a human but, know its not fancy because it wasn’t meant for you. submitted by /u/Honey-Badger-9325
Originally posted by u/Honey-Badger-9325 on r/ClaudeCode