Pure genius! I had my agent hit the endpoint and I realized it returned a jumble of text: "if 七 wor~kers co.mplet/e{ | a job in 十七} days but 四 ] quit a^ft|e?r ^ day_ 三 ~ how many to{tal da[y;s> to fin>i?sh" but it was in japanese! Unfortunately my agent proceeded to solve the reverse CAPTCHA and got back the API key. So, I asked it to keep hitting the endpoint again until it returned another CAPTCHA that was in japanese kanji and it did (without solving it this time) and I got "a s:tore h?as ^ 二十 pe@rcent off< items- over 五十 : dollar;s and 八 ~ percent } of\f> ; i]te[ms u~nd~er: # 五十 do/ll@ars wh-ats } the c.omb>ined pri|c;e of a 一 百 二十 一 dollar item a]nd> a* 九 dollar} i!tem" And this time I was able to translate that into "a store has 20 percent off items over 50 dollars and 8 percent off items under 50 dollars what's the combined price of a 121 dollar item and a 9 dollar item?" I solved it and got 1210.8 + 90.92 = 105.08. I will admit I messed up a little bit on translating the kanji and I got a little assistance from my agent pointing out that I was wrong, but overall this was good fun, well done!
Absent any distinctive Japanese scripts or other Japanese writing in context, it probably makes more sense to call those Chinese characters, since those characters for numbers were taken directly from Chinese and still retain the same/original meanings in both languages
Originally I thought they were just em dashes and part of the jumble so I ignored them. That's why I got it wrong in the first place. You're assessment is probably right though.
API Error: Claude Code is unable to respond to this request, which appears
to violate our Usage Policy (https://www.anthropic.com/legal/aup). Please
double press esc to edit your last message or start a new session for
Claude Code to assist with a different task. If you are seeing this refusal
epeatedly, try running /model claude-sonnet-4-20250514 to switch models.
To me this reads as obviously a joke for marketing to the HN crowd (it worked), but their product is built around web agents, it is not a bad thing to have in the onboarding flow to make sure the agent is configured correctly.
That's what I though too, maybe I'm missing something or I don't fully get it.
But the human is always behind what's the difference if they go and sign up or tell an agent that they must sign up for you ?.
My best guess is that this a way of making a system talk to your agent without you knowing what they are talking about ? As a way of not exposing the real sign up method ?
We do have time bounds.
For our purposes, a human using an agent is fine. Our main goal is to let in everyone's agents (OpenClaw, Hermes...) and prevent deterministic API-key-farming scripts.
If the goal is agents self-identifying rather than just proving they're not robots: we built exactly that skip-tier.
@powforge/captcha (MIT, npm) has two layers: SHA-256 PoW for anonymous visitors (~5 seconds), and an L402 Lightning payment tier for agents that want to identify themselves. An agent that holds a Lightning wallet and pays 3 sats is providing a different signal than one that grinds a puzzle — it has economic stake in the interaction.
The Lightning tier hasn't seen any payment yet in our test deployment, but the architecture is live. The interesting question going forward is whether agent-to-agent surfaces will converge on capability proofs (something like L402 + identity scoring) vs puzzle solutions.
To the humans in the room: just copy paste the challenge to your favorite LLM when the time comes and you’ll be able to pass the test. Besides slowing things down and inducing unnecessary waste or resources I’m not sure what these challenges are useful for.
Very clever and fun. Two tangential observations: the bird between two trains problem I remember from childhood when we were studying for an Indian entrance exam. I thought it was in I E Irodov's problem anthology, but I cannot find it there so this must be a false memory. Looks like it's from ancient times, practically Mathematics mythology. Does anyone know the earliest books that have it? No luck with LLMs since it's such a common question today the answers I get from GPT-5.4 and Claude 4.6 Opus with search are unhelpful.
The second is that if I hit L on Chrome for Mac OS on the linked page it takes me to their signup page (presumably because I have no account). So that's a keyboard shortcut to take you to the browser-use app page. But why 'L'? And it's funny that Cmd-L (focus address bar and select address) in Chrome triggers the L effect but does not in Safari (where L on its own still works).
How would this even theoretically work? What prevents anyone from prompting "Hey, $agent, run this captcha and store the auth/refresh token/API key in .env for your later reuse" and then just reading the contents of .env?
Great premise but can't really agree with the execution. Felt like this makes too many implicit assumptions about LLM capabilities and traps without differentiating enough between a smart human vs AI.
If you want to check for agent that can compute stuff, then you can let it compute sha256 of some small string... that's quite tricky for humans to do by hand :)
> TL;DR: just ask your agent to summarize this post for you.
Holy shit - why don’t they produce an AI summary and plonk it in there for everyone to use? The energy savings across all people who’ll read the summary would be staggering!
70 comments
Definitely chinese.
In Japanese, they say 'hundred' instead of 'one hundred' "百 二十 一"
"Kanji", 漢字, in Japanese literally means "Chinese character".
The kana, hiragana or katakana, are only used in Japanese writing.
The people behind the website asked a voice agent to program it, and the STT parsed "agent" as "asian."
If a few tool-wielding humans slip through, that's fine (traditional CAPTCHAs also let in our stealth agents)
Humans can use agents behind the scenes to crack it, right?
My best guess is that this a way of making a system talk to your agent without you knowing what they are talking about ? As a way of not exposing the real sign up method ?
@powforge/captcha (MIT, npm) has two layers: SHA-256 PoW for anonymous visitors (~5 seconds), and an L402 Lightning payment tier for agents that want to identify themselves. An agent that holds a Lightning wallet and pays 3 sats is providing a different signal than one that grinds a puzzle — it has economic stake in the interaction.
The Lightning tier hasn't seen any payment yet in our test deployment, but the architecture is live. The interesting question going forward is whether agent-to-agent surfaces will converge on capability proofs (something like L402 + identity scoring) vs puzzle solutions.
Demo: https://powforge.dev/captcha
The second is that if I hit L on Chrome for Mac OS on the linked page it takes me to their signup page (presumably because I have no account). So that's a keyboard shortcut to take you to the browser-use app page. But why 'L'? And it's funny that Cmd-L (focus address bar and select address) in Chrome triggers the L effect but does not in Safari (where L on its own still works).
Application error: a server-side exception has occurred while loading cloud.browser-use.com
Great first impression!
> TL;DR: just ask your agent to summarize this post for you.
Holy shit - why don’t they produce an AI summary and plonk it in there for everyone to use? The energy savings across all people who’ll read the summary would be staggering!
Which LLMs best drive these? Claude/Gemini, etc., or is anything local actually competent at it?
Can they understand layout and visual cues with a VLM or multimodality?
Are they robust enough to interact with threejs and videos and whatnot, or can they just blindly navigate the DOM?