[HN Gopher] Let your Coding Agent debug the browser session with...
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       Let your Coding Agent debug the browser session with Chrome
       DevTools MCP
        
       Author : xnx
       Score  : 236 points
       Date   : 2026-03-15 19:12 UTC (3 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (developer.chrome.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (developer.chrome.com)
        
       | aadishv wrote:
       | Someone already made a great agent skill for this, which I'm
       | using daily, and it's been _very_ cool!
       | 
       | https://github.com/pasky/chrome-cdp-skill
       | 
       | For example, I use codex to manage a local music library, and it
       | was able to use the skill to open a YT Music tab in my browser,
       | search for each album, and get the URL to pass to yt-dlp.
       | 
       | Do note that it only works for Chrome browsers rn, so you have to
       | edit the script to point to a different Chromium browser's binary
       | (e.g. I use Helium) but it's simple enough
        
         | Etheryte wrote:
         | On one hand, cool demo, on the other, this is horrifying in
         | more ways than I can begin to describe. You're literally one
         | prompt injection away from someone having unlimited access to
         | all of your everything.
        
           | aadishv wrote:
           | Of course I still watch it and have my finger on the escape
           | key at all times :)
        
             | bergheim wrote:
             | For now you are. All these things fall with time, of
             | course. You will stop caring once you start feeling safe,
             | we all do.
             | 
             | Also. AAarrgh, my new thing to be annoyed at is AI drivel
             | written slop.
             | 
             | "No browser automation framework, no separate browser
             | instance, no re-login."
             | 
             | Oh really, nice. No separate computer either? No separate
             | power station, no house, no star wars? No something else we
             | didn't ask for? Just one a toggle and you go? Whoaaaaaa.
             | 
             | Edit: lol even the skill itself is vibe coded:
             | 
             | Lightweight Chrome DevTools Protocol CLI. Connects directly
             | via WebSocket -- no Puppeteer, works with 100+ tabs,
             | instant connection.
             | 
             | I feel like there's nothing fucking left on the internet
             | anymore that is not some mean of whatever the LLM is
             | trained to talk like now.
        
               | tacitusarc wrote:
               | What can you do? I mentioned the use of AI on another
               | thread, asking essentially the same question. The comment
               | was flagged, presumably as off topic. Fair enough, I
               | guess. But about 80% (maybe more) of posted blogs etc
               | that I see on HN now have very obvious signs of AI.
               | Comments do too. I hate it. If I want to see what Claude
               | thinks I can ask it.
               | 
               | HN is becoming close to unusable, and this isn't like the
               | previous times where people say it's like reddit or
               | something. It is inundated with bot spam, it just happens
               | the bot spam is sufficiently engaging and well-written
               | that it is really hard to address.
        
               | bergheim wrote:
               | I hear you and I agree. I don't know. Gated communities?
        
             | glenpierce wrote:
             | I am in awe of the confidence you have in your reflexes.
        
               | aadishv wrote:
               | You get used to it :) And especially once you get used to
               | the YOLO lifestyle, you end up realizing that practically
               | any form of security is entirely worthless when you're
               | dealing with a 200 IQ brainwashed robot hacker.
               | 
               | I think using the Pi coding agent really got me used to
               | this way of thinking:
               | https://mariozechner.at/posts/2025-11-30-pi-coding-
               | agent/#to...
        
           | mh- wrote:
           | Not the person you're replying to, but: I just use a
           | separate, dedicated Chrome profile that isn't logged into
           | anything except what I'm working on. Then I keep the
           | persistence, but without commingling in a way that
           | dramatically increases the risk.
           | 
           | edit: upon rereading, I now realize the (different) prompt
           | injection risk you were calling out re: the handoff to yt-
           | dlp. Separate profiles won't save you from that, though there
           | are other approaches.
        
             | sofixa wrote:
             | Even without the bash escape risk (which can be mitigated
             | with the various ways of only allowing yt-dlp to be
             | executed), YT Music is a paid service gated behind a Google
             | account, with associated payment method. Even just stealing
             | the auth cookie is pretty serious in terms of damage it
             | could do.
        
               | mh- wrote:
               | Agreed. I wouldn't cut loose an agent that's at risk of
               | prompt injection w/ unscoped access to my primary Google
               | account.
               | 
               | But if I understood the original commenter's use case,
               | they're just searching YT Music to get the URL to a given
               | song. This appears[0] to work fine without being logged
               | in. So you could parameterize or wrap the call to yt-dlp
               | and only have your cookie jar usable there.
               | 
               | [0]: https://music.youtube.com/search?q=sandstorm
               | 
               | [1]: https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=XjvkxXblpz8
        
               | sofixa wrote:
               | Oh, that's true, even allows you to play without an
               | account. I can swear that at some point it flat out
               | refused any use unless you're logged in with an account
               | that has YT Music (I remember having to go to regular
               | YouTube to get the same song to send it to someone who
               | didn't have it).
        
             | bartek_gdn wrote:
             | That's also my approach, built quickly a cli for this with
             | lightweight session management
             | 
             | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47207790
        
           | sheepscreek wrote:
           | As long as it's gated and not turned on by default, it's all
           | good. They could also add a warning/sanity check similar to
           | "allow pasting" in the console.
        
             | hrmtst93837 wrote:
             | Relying on warnings or opt-ins for something with this
             | blast radius is security theater more than protection. The
             | cleverest malware barely waits for you to click OK before
             | making itself at home, so that checkbox is a speed bump on
             | a highway.
             | 
             | Chrome's 'allow pasting' gets ignored reflexively by most
             | users anyway. If this agent can touch DevTools the attack
             | surface expands far faster than most people realize or will
             | ever audit.
        
         | paulirish wrote:
         | To be clear, this isn't a skill for the devtools mcp, but an
         | independent project. It doesn't look bad, but obviously browser
         | automation + agents is a very busy space with lots of parallel
         | efforts.
         | 
         | DevTools MCP and its new CLI are maintained by the team behind
         | Chrome DevTools & Puppeteer and it certainly has a more
         | comprehensive feature set. I'd expect it to be more reliable,
         | but.. hey open source competition breeds innovation and I love
         | that. :)
         | 
         | (I used to work on the DevTools team. And I still do, too)
        
         | xmorse wrote:
         | Does anyone really use these hacked up with duct tape skills?
         | why not use something more reliable like playwriter.dev?
        
       | Yokohiii wrote:
       | Was already eye rolling about the headline. Then I realized it's
       | from chrome.
       | 
       | Hoping from some good stories from open claw users that
       | permanently run debug sessions.
        
       | NiekvdMaas wrote:
       | Also works nicely together with agent-browser
       | (https://github.com/vercel-labs/agent-browser) using --auto-
       | connect
        
       | speedgoose wrote:
       | Interesting. MCP APIs can be useful for humans too.
       | 
       | Chrome's dev tools already had an API [1], but perhaps the new
       | MCP one is more user friendly, as one main requirement of MCP
       | APIs is to be understood and used correctly by current gen AI
       | agents.
       | 
       | [1]: https://chromedevtools.github.io/devtools-protocol/
        
       | zxspectrumk48 wrote:
       | I found this one working amazingly well (same idea - connect to
       | existing session): https://github.com/remorses/playwriter
        
       | boomskats wrote:
       | Been using this one for a while, mostly with codex on opencode.
       | It's more reliable and token efficient than other devtools
       | protocol MCPs i've tried.
       | 
       | Favourite unexpected use case for me was telling gemini to use it
       | as a SVG editing repl, where it was able to produce some
       | fantastic looking custom icons for me after 3-4
       | generate/refresh/screenshot iterations.
       | 
       | Also works very nicely with electron apps, both reverse
       | engineering and extending.
        
       | raw_anon_1111 wrote:
       | I don't do any serious web development and haven't for 25 years
       | aside from recently vibe coding internal web admin portals for
       | back end cloud + app dev projects. But I did recently have to
       | implement a web crawler for a customer's site for a RAG project
       | using Chromium + Playwrite in a Docker container deployed to
       | Lambda.
       | 
       | I ran the Docker container locally for testing. Could a web
       | developer test using Claude + Chromium in a Docker container
       | without using their real Chrome instance?
        
       | slrainka wrote:
       | chrome-cli with remote developer port has been working fine this
       | entire time.
        
       | oldeucryptoboi wrote:
       | I tell Claude to use playwright so I don't even need to do the
       | setup myself.
        
         | nomilk wrote:
         | Similarly, cursor has a built in browser and visit localhost to
         | see the results in the browser. Although I don't use it much (I
         | probably should).
        
       | tonyhschu wrote:
       | Very cool. I do something like this but with Playwright. It used
       | to be a real token hog though, and got expensive fast. So much so
       | that I built a wrapper to dump results to disk first then let the
       | agent query instead. https://uisnap.dev/
       | 
       | Will check this out to see if they've solved the token burn
       | problem.
        
         | Torn wrote:
         | Mostly, yes: https://github.com/microsoft/playwright-cli
        
         | mambodog wrote:
         | my workaround for this was to make a wrapper mcp server which
         | uses claude haiku to summarize the page snapshot returned in
         | the response of each playwright mcp call, and that has worked
         | pretty well for me: https://github.com/jsdf/playwright-slim-mcp
        
       | JKolios wrote:
       | Now that there's widespread direct connectivity between agents
       | and browser sessions, are CAPTCHAs even relevant anymore?
        
       | pritesh1908 wrote:
       | I have been using Playwright for a fairly long time now. Do
       | checkout
        
       | glerk wrote:
       | Note that this is a mega token guzzler in case you're paying for
       | your own tokens!
        
       | senand wrote:
       | I suggest to use https://github.com/simonw/rodney instead
        
         | meowface wrote:
         | Unfortunately there are like a billion competitors to this
         | right now (including Playwright MCP, Playwright CLI, the new
         | baked-in Playwright feature in Codex /experimental, Claude Code
         | for Chrome...) and I can never quite decide if or when I should
         | try to switch. I'm still just using the ordinary Playwright MCP
         | server in both Codex and Claude Code, for the time being.
        
       | rossvc wrote:
       | I've been using the DevTools MCP for months now, but it's
       | extremely token heavy. Is there an alternative that provides the
       | same amount of detail when it comes to reading back network
       | requests?
        
         | nerdsniper wrote:
         | It's probably not fully optimized and could be compacted more
         | with just some effort, and further with clever techniques, but
         | browser state/session data will always use up a ton of tokens
         | because it's a ton of data. There's not really a way around
         | that. AI's have a surprising "intuition" about problems that
         | often help them guess at solutions based on insufficient
         | information (and they guess correctly more often than I expect
         | they should). But when their intuition isn't enough and you
         | need to feed them the real logs/data...it's always gonna use a
         | bunch of tokens.
         | 
         | This is one place where human intuition helps a ton today. If
         | you can find the most relevant snippets and give the AI just
         | the right context, it does a much better job.
        
         | mmaunder wrote:
         | Yes. CLI. Always CLI. Never MCP. Ever. You're welcome.
        
           | nerdsniper wrote:
           | That doesn't solve the issue here because the amount of data
           | in the browser state dwarfs the MCP overhead.
        
             | cheema33 wrote:
             | > That doesn't solve the issue here because the amount of
             | data in the browser state dwarfs the MCP overhead.
             | 
             | The problem with MCP is that you are paying the price in
             | token usage, even if you are not using the MCP server. Why
             | would anybody want that?
             | 
             | And no, the tool search function recently introduced by
             | Anthropic does not completely solve this problem.
        
         | DimitriBouriez wrote:
         | i'm experimenting with a different approach (no CDP/ARIA trees,
         | just Chrome extension messaging that returns a numbered list of
         | interactive elements). Way lighter on tokens and undetectable
         | but still very experimental :
         | https://github.com/DimitriBouriez/navagent-mcp
        
         | Torn wrote:
         | https://github.com/microsoft/playwright-cli and https://agent-
         | browser.dev/
        
       | mmaunder wrote:
       | Google is so far behind agentic cli coding. Gemini CLI is awful.
       | So bad in fact that it's clear none of their team use it. Also
       | MCP is very obviously dead, as any of us doing heavy agentic
       | coding know. Why permanently sacrifice that chunk of your context
       | window when you can just use CLI tools which are also faster and
       | more flexible and many are already trained in. Playwright with
       | headless Chromium or headed chrome is what anyone serious is
       | using and we get all the dev and inspection tools already. And it
       | works perfectly. This only has appeal to those starting out and
       | confused into thinking this is the way. The answer is almost
       | never MCP.
        
         | girvo wrote:
         | I know it's a bit of a tangent but man you're right re. Gemini
         | CLI. It's woefully bad, barely works. Maybe because I was a
         | "free" user trying it out at the time, but it was such a bad
         | experience it turned me off subscribing to whatever their
         | coding plan is called today.
        
           | luckydata wrote:
           | it's not the CLI, it's the model. The model wasn't trained to
           | do that kind of work, was trained to do one shot coding, not
           | sustained back and forth until it gets it right like Claude
           | and ChatGPT.
        
         | rsalus wrote:
         | MCP is very much not dead. centralized remote MCP servers are
         | incredibly useful. also bespoke CLIs still require guidance for
         | models to use effectively, so it's clear that token efficiency
         | is still an issue regardless.
        
           | nojito wrote:
           | all you need is a simple skills.md and maybe a couple
           | examples and codex picks up my custom toolkit and uses it.
        
             | dominotw wrote:
             | whats your custom toolkit
        
           | abhis3798 wrote:
           | I see remote MCP servers as a great interface to consume api
           | responses. The idea that you essentially make your apis
           | easily available to agents to bring in relevant context is a
           | powerful one.
           | 
           | When folks say MCP is dead, I don't get it. What other
           | alternatives exist in place of MCP? Arbitrary code via
           | curl/sdks to call a remote endpoint?
        
           | Torn wrote:
           | Tbh I find self-documenting CLIs (e.g. with a `--help` flag,
           | and printing correct usage examples when LLMs make things up)
           | plus a skill that's auto invoked to be pretty reliable. CLIs
           | can do OAuth dances too just fine.
           | 
           | MCP's remaining moats I think are:
           | 
           | - No-install product integrations (just paste in mcp config
           | into app)
           | 
           | - Non-developer end users / no shell needed (no terminal)
           | 
           | - Multi-tenant auth (many users, dynamic OAuth)
           | 
           | - Security sandboxing (restrict what agents can do),
           | credential sandboxing (agents never see secrets)
           | 
           | - Compliance/audit (structured logs, schema enforcement)?
           | 
           | If you're a developer building for developers though, CLI
           | seems to be a clear winner right
        
             | quotemstr wrote:
             | Imagine if, in addition to local MCP "servers", the MCP
             | people had nurtured a structured CLI-based --help-
             | equivalent consumable by LLMs and shell completion engines
             | alike. Doing so, you unify "CLI" (trivial deployment; human
             | accessibility) and MCP-style (structured and discoverable
             | tool calling) in a single DWIM artifact.
             | 
             | But since when has this industry done the right thing
             | informed by wisdom and hindsight?
        
           | mattnewton wrote:
           | I think cli's are more token efficient- the help menu is
           | loaded only when needed, and the output is trivially pipe
           | able to grep or jq to filter out what the model actually
           | wants
        
         | spiderfarmer wrote:
         | MCP is not just used for coding.
        
         | cheema33 wrote:
         | > Also MCP is very obviously dead
         | 
         | Some people will push back on this. They are holding out hope
         | that the recent improvements Anthropic has made in this regard
         | have improved the context rot problem with MCP. Anthropic's
         | changes improve things a little. But it is akin to putting
         | lipstick on a pig. It helps, but not much.
         | 
         | The reason MCP is dying/dead is because MCP servers, once
         | configured, bloat up context even when they are not being used.
         | Why would anybody want that?
         | 
         | Use agent skills. And say goodbye to MCP. We need to move on
         | from MCP.
        
           | dominotw wrote:
           | i am using notion mcp. is there a corresponding skill. also
           | wtf is a plugin.
        
         | sega_sai wrote:
         | I don't know if this just anecdotal random impression, but in a
         | last week or two I had mostly good experience with Google cli.
         | While previously I constantly complained about it. I have been
         | using it together with codex, and I would not say that one is
         | much better than another.
         | 
         | It is hard to say nowadays, when things change so quickly
        
         | zeroxfe wrote:
         | > Also MCP is very obviously dead, as any of us doing heavy
         | agentic coding know.
         | 
         | As someone that does heavy agentic coding (using basically all
         | the tools), this is so far from the truth. People claiming this
         | have probably never worked in large enterprise environments
         | where things like authentication, RBAC, rate limiting, abuse
         | detection, centralized management/updates/ops, etc. are a huge
         | part of the development and deployment workflow.
         | 
         | In these situations you can't just use skills and cli tools
         | without a gigantic amount of retooling and increased
         | operational and security complexity. MCP is really useful here,
         | and allows centralized eng and ops teams to manage their
         | services in a way that aligns with the organizations overall
         | posture, policies, and infrastructure.
         | 
         | > Google is so far behind agentic cli coding. Gemini CLI is
         | awful.
         | 
         | This part I totally agree. It's really hard to express how bad
         | it is (and it's really disappointing.)
        
         | quotemstr wrote:
         | > Why permanently sacrifice that chunk of your context window
         | when you can just use CLI tools which are also faster and more
         | flexible and many are already trained in
         | 
         | What about all the CLI tools not baked into the model's priors?
         | 
         | Every time someone says "extensibility mechanism X is dead!", I
         | think "Well, I guess that guy isn't doing anything that needs
         | to extend the statistical average of 2010s-era Reddit"
        
       | dataviz1000 wrote:
       | I use Playwright to intercept all requests and responses and have
       | Claude Code navigate to a website like YouTube and click and
       | interact with all the elements and inputs while recording all the
       | requests and responses associated with each interaction. Then it
       | creates a detailed strongly typed API to interact with any
       | website using the underlying API.
       | 
       | Yes, I know it likely breaks everybody's terms of service but at
       | the same time I'm not loading gigabytes of ads, images, markup,
       | to accomplish things.
       | 
       | If anyone is interested I can take some time and publish it this
       | week.
        
         | xrd wrote:
         | Yes, please do!
        
           | dataviz1000 wrote:
           | 100% I'll response to this by Friday with link to Github.
           | 
           | I use Patchright + Ghostery and I have a cleaver tool that
           | uses web sockets to pass 1 second interval screenshots to the
           | a dashboard and pointer / keyboard events to the server which
           | allow interacting with websites so that a user can create
           | authentication that is stored in the chrome user profile with
           | all the cookies, history, local storage, ect.. in the cloud
           | on a server.
           | 
           | Can you list some websites that don't require subscription
           | that you would like to me to test against? I used this for
           | Robinhood and I think Linked in would be a good example for
           | people to use.
        
             | zzleeper wrote:
             | Another +1, it would be incredibly useful to play with this
             | approach! (and fun)
        
         | defen wrote:
         | Would this hypothetically be able to download arbitrary videos
         | from youtube without the constant yt-dlp arms race?
        
           | dataviz1000 wrote:
           | > yt-dlp arms race
           | 
           | I don't know anything about yt-dlp.
           | 
           | It would probably help people who want to go to a concert and
           | have a chance to beat the scalpers cornering the market on an
           | event in 30 seconds hitting the marketplace services with
           | 20,000 requests.
           | 
           | I can try to see if can bypass yt-dlp. But that is always a
           | cat and mouse game.
        
             | defen wrote:
             | To clarify - yt-dlp is a command line tool for downloading
             | youtube videos, but it's in a constant arms race with the
             | youtube website because they are constantly changing things
             | in a way that blocks yt-dlp.
        
           | dawnerd wrote:
           | Don't know how this could be more stable than ytdlp. When
           | issues come up they're fixed really quickly.
        
             | varenc wrote:
             | yt-dlp was very recently broken for ~2 days for any Youtube
             | videos that required cookies: https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-
             | dlp/issues/16212
             | 
             | Here is what actually fixed it: https://github.com/yt-
             | dlp/ejs/pull/53/changes
             | 
             | yt-dlp is relatively stable, but still occasionally breaks
             | for long periods. I get the sense YouTube is becoming
             | increasingly adversarial to yt-dlp as well.
             | 
             | I don't know the details, but it doesn't seem like yt-dlp
             | is running the entire YouTube JS+DOM environment. Something
             | like a real headless browser seems like it would break less
             | often, but be much heavier weight. And Youtube might have
             | all sorts of other mitigations against this approach.
        
               | toomuchtodo wrote:
               | I think having a hook to an LLM endpoint to enable yt-dlp
               | to attempt to self resolve until an official fix is
               | available would be a useful enhancement.
        
         | Axsuul wrote:
         | Why even use Playwright for this? I feel like Claude just needs
         | agent-browser and it can generate deterministic code from it.
        
           | dsrtslnd23 wrote:
           | you mean this one? https://github.com/vercel-labs/agent-
           | browser
        
             | dataviz1000 wrote:
             | It is 2 months old!
             | 
             | My excuse for not keeping up is that I'm in so deep that
             | Claude Code can predict the stock market.
             | 
             | I'll still publish mine and see if has any value but agent
             | browser looks very complete.
             | 
             | Thank you for sharing!
        
         | Johnny_Bonk wrote:
         | Yes, please do and ping me when it's done lol. Did you make it
         | into an agent skill?
        
           | dataviz1000 wrote:
           | Exactly, it is an agent skill that interacts pressing buttons
           | and stuff with a webpage capturing and documenting all the
           | API requests the page makes using Playwright's request /
           | response interception methods. It creates and strongly typed
           | well documented API at the end.
        
             | bengt wrote:
             | Sounds awesome. I've been using mitmproxy's --mode local to
             | intercept with a separate skill to read flow files dumped
             | from it, but interactive is even better.
        
         | schainks wrote:
         | Very interested. Would even pay for an api for this. I am doing
         | something similar with vibium and need something more token
         | efficient.
        
         | retinaros wrote:
         | isnt it what everyone that needs web validation does?
        
         | toomuchtodo wrote:
         | Please publish!
        
         | mikrl wrote:
         | I was doing similar by capturing XHR requests while clicking
         | through manually, then asking codex to reverse engineer the API
         | from the export.
         | 
         | Never tried that level of autonomy though. How long is your
         | iteration cycle?
         | 
         | If I had to guess, mine was maybe 10-20 minutes over a few
         | prompts.
        
         | bredren wrote:
         | I also do this. My primary use case is for reproducing page
         | layout and styling at any given tree in the dom. So, capturing
         | various states of a component etc.
         | 
         | I also use it to automatically retrieve page responsiveness
         | behavior in complex web apps. It uses playwright to adjust the
         | width and monitor entire trees for exact changes which it
         | writes structured data that includes the complete cascade of
         | styles relevant with screenshots to support the snapshots.
         | 
         | There are tools you can buy that let you do this kind of
         | inspection manually, but they are designed for humans.
        
       | silverwind wrote:
       | I found Firefox with https://github.com/padenot/firefox-devtools-
       | mcp to work better then the default Chrome MCP, is seems much
       | faster.
        
       | paulirish wrote:
       | The DevTools MCP project just recently landed a standalone CLI:
       | https://github.com/ChromeDevTools/chrome-devtools-mcp/blob/m...
       | 
       | Great news to all of us keenly aware of MCP's wild token costs.
       | ;)
       | 
       | The CLI hasn't been announced yet (sorry guys!), but it is
       | shipping in the latest v0.20.0 release. (Disclaimer: I used to
       | work on the DevTools team. And I still do, too)
        
         | commanderkeen08 wrote:
         | MCPs cost nothing in CC now with Tool Search.
        
           | cheema33 wrote:
           | > MCPs cost nothing in CC now with Tool Search.
           | 
           | This is incorrect. Plenty of people have run the numbers.
           | Tool search does not fix all problems with MCP.
        
             | ehsanu1 wrote:
             | What are the numbers? Are there problems other than context
             | usage you refer to?
        
           | wahnfrieden wrote:
           | Codex also has this...
        
       | cheema33 wrote:
       | How does this compare with playwright CLI?
       | 
       | https://github.com/microsoft/playwright-cli
        
         | EGreg wrote:
         | It's made by Google and comes with Chrome
        
         | Torn wrote:
         | I personally found playwright-cli, and agent-browser which
         | wraps playwright, both more token-efficient than using the raw
         | mcp.
         | 
         | Odd that this article from Dec 2025 has been posted to the top
         | of HN though
        
       | anesxvito wrote:
       | Been using MCP tooling heavily for a few months and browser
       | debugging integration is one of those things that sounds gimmicky
       | until you actually try it. The real question is whether it
       | handles flaky async state reliably or just hallucinates what it
       | thinks the DOM looks like?
        
       | netdur wrote:
       | I wrote an ai agent that do chrome testing, yes, chrome MCP do
       | work
       | https://github.com/netdur/hugind/tree/main/agent/chrome_test...
        
       | paseante wrote:
       | The real problem this thread exposes is that we're duct-taping
       | browser automation (Playwright, CDP, MCP wrappers) onto an
       | interface designed for humans -- the DOM. Every approach
       | discussed here is fighting the same battle: too many tokens to
       | represent page state, flaky selectors, hallucinated DOM
       | structures, massive context cost.
       | 
       | What we actually need is a standard for websites to expose a
       | machine-readable interaction layer alongside the human one.
       | Something like robots.txt but for agent capabilities -- declaring
       | available actions, their parameters, authentication requirements,
       | and response schemas. Not scraping the DOM and hoping the AI
       | figures out which button to click.
       | 
       | The web already went through this evolution once: we went from
       | screen-scraping HTML to structured APIs. Now we're regressing
       | back to scraping because agents need to interact with sites that
       | only have human interfaces. A lightweight standard -- call it
       | agents.json or whatever -- where sites declare "here are the
       | actions you can take, here are the endpoints, here's the auth
       | flow" would eliminate 90% of the token waste, security concerns,
       | and fragility discussed in this thread.
       | 
       | Until that exists, we'll keep building increasingly clever hacks
       | on top of a 30-year-old document format that was never designed
       | for machine consumption.
        
         | quotemstr wrote:
         | > expose a machine-readable interaction layer alongside the
         | human one
         | 
         | Which is called ARIA and has been a thing forever.
        
         | codybontecou wrote:
         | Is this just a well-documented API?
        
         | ElectricalUnion wrote:
         | > interface designed for humans -- the DOM.
         | 
         | Citation needed.
         | 
         | > The web already went through this evolution once: we went
         | from screen-scraping HTML to structured APIs. Now we're
         | regressing back to scraping because agents need to interact
         | with sites that only have human interfaces.
         | 
         | To me, sites that "only have human interfaces" are more likely
         | that not be that way _totally on purpose_ , attempting to
         | maximize human retention/engagement and are more likely to
         | require strict anti-bot measures like Proof-of-Work to be
         | usable at all.
        
       | bartek_gdn wrote:
       | My approach is a thin cli wrapper instead.
       | 
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47207790
        
       | holoduke wrote:
       | One tip for the illegal scrapers or automators out there.
       | Casperjs and phanthomjs are still working very well for anti bot
       | detection. These are very old libs no longer maintained. But I
       | can even scrape and authenticate at my banks.
        
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