Operator is in the news – one of my friends recently shared a video of someone using it to buy stuff online. It runs on ChatGPT 01 or 03 reasoning model. DeepSeek R1 is just as good, right? Let’s clone it!
How I did it
- Found a tutorial online
– of course I’m not the first person to try this - Add the tutorial webpage to Aider context (to send to DeepSeek)
– I did skim it first, looked OK, using cool libraries and stuff - Add some specifications (prompt) and tell DeepSeek to make it for me.
– using Python with Gradio and Browser Use – a way to control Chrome easily with AI.
The result
DeepSeek with Aider’s “Architect mode” did an amazing job. It required some guidance about what exactly I wanted – the tutorial was more of an inspiration than something I wanted to copy exactly. As usual there were errors and I had to spend a few hours asking the AI to debug code – as well as doing it manually on occasion. AI programming is not foolproof and will not replace us in it’s current state – it’s a tool only. A great tool – but only a tool.
I love good tools.
DeepSeek decided that it needed to record it’s progress as a gif, made up of screenshots. I didn’t ask it to do this, and it wasn’t mentioned in the tutorial either.
Here is the slideshow for “Find me the cheapest Android phone on gumtree”. It also returned the results in text format.
Conclusion
It was super fun asking my “DeepSeek Operator” to do something and then watching it click around in the browser, even working out that it had to accept cookies before continuing!
As you can see, the tools for this type of operation exist in the Open Source world already. I think that Agentic AI is almost ready to take over the browser and do a lot of your work for you – if you are willing to trust it. It could be great for research for example.
Having said that, the DeepSeek R1 model was pretty slow via api. I think that may be a problem with reasoning models in general, though. Also, it didn’t find the actual cheapest phone, I did that myself in a few seconds afterwards to double check the result.
What do you think, should I publish my Python powered OpenAI Operator clone to GitHub?
Update:
I published it! You need a DeepSeek api key for this to work*
*currently the service is down again, hopefully they will find a way to scale it soon