Launch HN: Kampala (YC W26) – 앱을 API로 역공학
Source: Hacker News
Hey! I am Alex and together with my co‑founder Tarun we built Kampala (https://www.zatanna.ai/kampala). It’s a man‑in‑the‑middle (MITM) style proxy that lets you agentically reverse‑engineer existing workflows without brittle browser automation or computer‑use agents. It works for websites, mobile apps, and desktop apps.
Demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_PeostC-b4
The Problem
Many people spend hours each day in legacy dashboards and on‑prem solutions reconciling data across platforms. Current automation attempts rely on browser automations or computer‑use agents, which are:
- Brittle
- Slow
- Nondeterministic
Our Background
I come from a web reverse‑engineering background and have spent the last 7–8 years building integrations by hand for sneaker/ticket releases, sportsbook logins, and everything in between. During that time I consulted for several companies and helped them move from browser‑based infrastructure to the requests layer.
When we started Zatanna (our company name) we worked in dental tech, dealing with countless insurance‑payer dashboards and legacy dental‑practice solutions. Our superpower—as a fairly undifferentiated voice‑agent/front‑desk assistant company—was that we could integrate with nearly any system requested. While doing this we built extensive tooling, including what we now call Kampala, to spin up integrations quickly.
Why Existing MITM Proxies Didn’t Fit
- They manipulated the TLS and HTTP/2 fingerprint over the wire, which was detected by strict anti‑bot measures.
- They had poor MCPs (Man‑in‑the‑Middle Control Panels) that didn’t expose necessary features like scripts/replay.
- They didn’t allow building workflows or actions from a sample or sequence of requests.
How Kampala Works
Because Kampala is a MITM proxy, it can leverage existing session tokens and anti‑bot cookies, enabling deterministic automation in seconds. You have two ways to create scripts/APIs:
- Agent harness – prompts you for the actions you want and directly creates the script/API.
- MCP (Manual Control Panel) – you perform a workflow once, then ask your preferred coding agent to use Kampala to generate a script/API that replicates it.
Once you have an API/script you can:
- Export it
- Run it locally
- Have us host it for you
Real‑World Use Cases
- Internally we used Kampala to scrape conference attendees, connect to external PMS systems, and interact with Slack apps.
- I even helped my property‑manager mother automate 2–3 hours of billing entry in Yardi.
These examples showed us that the tool’s value extends far beyond dentistry.
Vision
We believe the future of automation isn’t about sending screenshots of webpages to LLMs; it’s about operating at the layer that computers actually understand—the request/response layer.
Excited to hear your thoughts, questions, and feedback!
Comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47794514 (Points: 16, Comments: 7)