18 comments

  • loktarogar 27 minutes ago
    In my experience reverse engineering is often the easy bit, or at least easy compared to what follows: maintenance. Knowing both when and how it fails when it fails (eg in cases like when the API stops returning any results but is still otherwise valid). Knowing when the response has changed in a way that is subtle to detect, like they changed the format of a single field, which may still parse correctly but is now interpreted incorrectly.

    How do you keep up with the maintenance?

  • dewey 11 hours ago
    If your landing page doesn't look like this, you've launched too late: https://integuru.ai
    • bryant 8 hours ago
      Page source is amazing. I can't remember the last time I've seen a serious YC company launch page with absolutely zero JavaScript. Even the CSS is just a single selector.

      I'm a fan.

    • silvanocerza 8 hours ago
      Their website is this one though. :) https://www.taiki.ai/
      • swyx 4 hours ago
        @richardzhang what is the relationship between taiki and integuru? is this a pivot?
        • richardzhang 4 hours ago
          We should definitely further clarify this! We built Integuru as an internal tool while building the products for Taiki. Then we realized that other developers may need the agent, too, so we decided to open-source Integuru. In terms of the current focus for our team, we are spending most of our time on Integuru because newly requested integrations take some of our resources to build, and we want to continue improving the agent. I think the correct way to frame this is a market expansion, where we're expanding beyond the tax industry.
    • ocean_moist 9 hours ago
      I wish I could do this… best part of building for devs is being able to provide simple, good UX with minimal UI.
    • geoctl 9 hours ago
      Still looks more interesting than that Next.js landing page template used by every startup these days.
    • ramenlover 8 hours ago
      I don't know what my PM would say but to me this is "excellent and appealing design"
    • btbuildem 6 hours ago
      This is what happens when your daily grind is cutting through all kinds of atrocious and excessive "web design" in order to get at information.
    • qsort 11 hours ago
      Literally peak graphics.
  • shmatt 11 hours ago
    I just noticed over the weekend new Claude agreed to reverse engineer a graphql server with introspection turned off, something Im pretty sure it would have refused for ethical reasons before the new version

    it kept writing scripts, i would paste the output, and it would keep going, until it was able to create its own working discount code on an actual retail website

    The only issue with these kinds of things is breaking robots.txt rules and the possibility things will break without notice, and often

    The use of unofficial APIs can be legally questionable [1]

    [1] https://law.stackexchange.com/questions/93831/legality-of-us...

    As the authors of essentially a hacking tool, I would expect at least some legal boilerplate language about not being liable

    • richardzhang 10 hours ago
      We are working on a way to auto-patch internal APIs that change by having another agent trigger the requests.

      Regarding the legality aspects — really appreciate you mentioning this — we’ve put a lot of thought into these issues, and it’s something we’re continually working on and refining.

      Ultimately, our goal is to allow each developer to make their own informed decision regarding the policies of the platforms that they're working with. There are situations where unofficial APIs can be both legal and beneficial, such as when they're used to access data that the end user rightfully owns and controls.

      For our hosted service, we aim to balance serving legitimate data needs with safeguarding against bad actors, and we’re fully aware this can be a tricky line to navigate. What this looks like in reality would be to prioritize use cases where the end-user truly owns the data. But we know this is not always black-and-white, and will come up with the right legal language as you recommended. What does help our case is that many companies are making unofficial APIs for their own purposes, so there are legal precedents that we can refer to.

      • shmatt 9 hours ago
        I have to disagree, it is definitely not legal in the US to use unauthorized access points to access authorized data. Thats like saying you're allowed to get into your apartment through breaking your neighbors door and climbing between the windows

        In the US this is pretty simply covered by Computer Misuse Act and Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, both federal laws

        Im not claiming you're liable, just surprised no lawyer pointed this out at YC

        • conradev 7 hours ago
          There is a carve out if the data is "publicly available": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HiQ_Labs_v._LinkedIn

          If I open the Safeway app and it fetches what is available in a given store without any authentication and everyone sees the same data, that could possibly fall under that exemption.

        • chatmasta 4 hours ago
          If my browser is downloading some data, then what’s the difference if my AI agent is doing the same? I’ll even tell you it’s my browser. Who are you to say what qualifies as a browser?
        • daveguy 8 hours ago
          This analogy is completely off. A closer analogy is someone calls you on your phone letting you know they're here. You were expecting them, so you say "come on in." But, they were at the back door instead of the front door. I don't think anyone would consider that your friend did something illegal.
          • korkybuchek 7 hours ago
            Yeah, the CFAA doesn't work by analogy unfortunately.
            • erohead 4 hours ago
              CFAA has recently (2021) been limited by Van Buren ruling.
  • shubb 48 minutes ago
    There are a lot of companies using old custom or self hosted webapps that they control but can't change - maybe the 3rd party that built it kept the code, maybe its an orphan product, maybe the silo that owns it won't build an api.

    Anyway a lot of good points here about legalities she shifting APIs, but I think there are plenty of situations where this is great and none of that applies.

  • _hl_ 11 hours ago
    This is awesome, but I'm not sure what the long-term use case for the intersection of low-latency integration and non-production-stable is? I'm saying this as someone with way more experience than I'd like to in using reverse-engineered APIs as part of production products... You inevitably run into breakages, sometimes even actively hostile platforms, which will degrade user experience as users wait for your 1day window to fix their product again.

    Though I suppose if you can auto-fix and retry issues within ~1minute or so it could work?

    • alanloo 10 hours ago
      This is a very important question. Thank you for bringing this up! Currently it requires human intervention to auto-fix integrations as someone needs to trigger the correct network request. We are planning on having another agent that triggers the network requests through interacting with the UI and then passing the network request to Integuru.
    • lo0dot0 8 hours ago
      New pipe breaks regularly. It's almost like YouTube changes the API on purpose to hurt 3rd party clients that don't show ads.
      • miki123211 3 hours ago
        Either that, or they just straight up don't care.

        I think it's pretty likely that they just don't look at or test Newpipe when they change their APIs. If the change doesn't break any official clients, it goes through.

        With how large Youtube is, I iimagine API changes are not infrequent.

  • toomuchtodo 11 hours ago
    Brilliant. Is the next part to monitor and autocorrect breakage when the API in scope changes unexpectedly underneath the system? This is a pain point of workflow automation systems that integrate with APIs in my experience, typically requiring a human to triage an alert (due to an unexpected external API change), pause worker queues, ship a fix, and then resume queue processing.

    Love the landing page, please keep it.

    • alanloo 11 hours ago
      Thanks and yes that's part of the roadmap!

      Currently you need to trigger the UI actions manually to generate the network requests used by Integuru. But we're planning automate the whole thing by having another agent auto-trigger the UI actions to generate the network requests first, and then have Integuru reverse-engineer the requests.

  • mdaniel 9 hours ago
    Ah, by clicking on the Taiki logo to see what the ... parent company? ... builds, I now understand how this came about. And I'll be honest, as someone who hates all that tax paperwork gathering with all my heart, this launch may have gotten you a new customer for Taiki :-)

    Also, just as a friendly suggestion, given what both(?) products seemingly do, this section could use some love other than "we use TLS": https://www.taiki.ai/faq#:~:text=How%20does%20Taiki%20handle... since TLS doesn't care about storing credentials in plain text in a DB, for example

    ---

    p.s. the GitHub organization in your .gitmodules is still pointing to Unofficial-APIs which I actually think you should have kept o/

    • alanloo 9 hours ago
      Thank you for your suggestions, and really glad to hear you're excited about Taiki! We will update the the FAQ with your suggestions — honestly, this part of the website is a bit outdated, and we will make sure to change it.

      Regarding the Unofficial-APIs name, it was a really tough decision. We liked the name a lot but just thought it was a bit long. A Real pleasant surprise that you found it :)

  • imranq 9 hours ago
    Wow this is great! I think this is kind of the future of automation and "computer use" once LLMs become powerful enough.

    Every task on the web can be reduced down to a series of backend calls, and the key is extracting out the minimal graph that can replicate that task.

  • blakeburch 9 hours ago
    Really digging this idea.

    I've spent plenty of time trying to dig into the network tab to automate requests to a website without an API. Cool to see the process streamlined with LLMs. Wishing you all the best of luck!

  • jerrygenser 10 hours ago
    Will this work for SSR applications? e.g. think old school net or jsp apps which make network requests then receive HTML which then needs to be parsed in order to understand the key pieces of information and then additional network requests?

    I've found it relatively straight forward to reverse engineer SPA requests however with server side rendered apps, yow would your service handle that?

    • alanloo 10 hours ago
      Good question. Finding the request that's responsible for the action you want will be a bit trickier for SSR, but it's still possible for most cases. It auto-generates regex (for now) to parse out needed info out of the html template.
      • jerrygenser 10 hours ago
        Another thing I've seen is that some of these old school apps are sending certain requests that don't modify the page but set server side context which subsequent requests are dependent on.

        For example, set context to a particular group and then subsequent navigation depends is filtered on that group even though the filter is not explicit on the client side but due to state stored in the session remotely.

        This can also have implications on concurrency for a given session where you need to either create separate sessions or make sure there is some lock on particular parts of server side state.

        Would this type of this eventually be possible? Or at least hooks in able for us to add custom code such as session locks

        • alanloo 8 hours ago
          Very interesting to hear about your experience here! We haven't come across a website that has this design and don't offer support for this just yet. We can certainly implement if more people face a similar situation.
    • toomuchtodo 10 hours ago
      Would be cool to use a proxy to MITM to twiddle the bits (with its own API) if the use case isn't supported by a browser or robotic process automation driving the app's client side UX.
      • jerrygenser 10 hours ago
        I was talking about web apps. But yeah, for old school desktop apps or windows native proxy MITM works
  • abuhasho 1 hour ago
    The best ideas are ones that start off with an internal painpoint. Congrats!
  • rumpelstilzchen 10 hours ago
    Nice work, congrats! How do you deal with security related stuff like recaptcha, signed requests and so on?

    Do you also support internal APIs of mobile applications? If so, how do you deal with AppCheck / PlayIntegrity / Android Key Attestation / Apple App Attest?

    • alanloo 10 hours ago
      Thank you! Integuru itself doesn't handle recaptchas and signed requests, but we have a hosted solution where we use third-party services to handle recaptchas and manually create integrations for handling signed requests.

      We do not directly support APIs for mobile applications; however, if you use MITM software and get all the network requests into a .har file, Integuru should work as expected. We do not handle AppCheck ATM at the moment unfortunately.

  • nkotov 10 hours ago
    This is really awesome. There's several platforms that intentionally gate keep their API and it makes really annoying to build integrations with them. How do you go about these platforms and not breaking their TOS?
    • richardzhang 10 hours ago
      Thank you! There are definitely platforms that intentionally gate-keep their APIs. A good example is LinkedIn, which many companies still try to force-build their own integrations with. Our goal is to allow each developer to make their own informed decision regarding the policies of the platforms that they're working with. For our hosted service, we want to prioritize use cases where the end-user truly owns the data. We can also refer to legal precedent cases where many other companies make unofficial APIs.
    • compootr 10 hours ago
      I don't think it really matters to them. As a provider giving access to these platforms, they're not the user (and they didn't agree to the terms). the end user did, so it's on them to decide whether they risk getting terminated or whatnot
      • DougWebb 8 hours ago
        If they have deeper pockets than the user, they're the ones who will get sued for abuse they enable.
  • Prosammer 11 hours ago
    Very cool, congratulations! Would this work for graphql APIs with introspection disabled?
    • alanloo 11 hours ago
      Thank you! As long as the network request contains the query, it should work as expected. So yes it should work with introspection disabled graphQL APIs. Excited to see what you do with it!
  • kevo1ution 7 hours ago
    going from tax api reverse engineering to making it easier to reverse engineer any API is smart pivot
  • andrewski77 8 hours ago
    congratulations! this is such a cool idea
  • bstanfield15 9 hours ago
    Hell yeah! Love to see this launch. We have spent a lot of time at Wren recently trying to reverse engineer some local law APIs to help make renewable energy developer lives easier (less parsing through hundreds of PDFs, dead links, etc.) -- going to try this out and see if it can speed up our workflow.
    • richardzhang 9 hours ago
      Thank you! Would love your feedback after you use it!
  • dangsux 7 hours ago
    [dead]