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…
I love how HN is loving this idea when it's the exact same thing Anthropic and OpenAi (and every other llm maker) did. It's God's gift to them when it lets them bypass ads and dl copyrighted material. But it's Satan's curse on humanity when the Zuck does it to train his llm and dl copyrighted material.
Chrome DevTools MCP (2025)
201–210 of 266 posts
Re: Chrome DevTools MCP (2025)
#202Earlier quoted context omitted.
I love how HN is loving this idea when it's the exact same thing Anthropic and OpenAi (and every other llm maker) did. It's God's gift to them when it lets them bypass ads and dl copyrighted material. But it's Satan's curse on humanity when the Zuck does it to train his llm and dl copyrighted material.
You can see this pattern in many different topics: updoots are highly correlated with a positive answer to "do I personally get to profit"?
Re: Chrome DevTools MCP (2025)
#203I 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…
Re: Chrome DevTools MCP (2025)
#204Re: Chrome DevTools MCP (2025)
#205I asked Claude to use this with the new scheduled tasks /loop skill to update my Oscar picks site every five minutes during tonight’s awards show. It simply visited the Oscars' realtime feed via Chrome DevTools, and updated my picks and pushed to gh pages. It even handled the tie correctly. https://danielraffel.me/2026/03/16/my-oscar-2026-picks/ I know I could just use claude --chrome, but I’m used to this excellent…
Re: Chrome DevTools MCP (2025)
#206Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 tog…
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 time…
Re: Chrome DevTools MCP (2025)
#207Re: Chrome DevTools MCP (2025)
#208Someone 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 t…
Re: Chrome DevTools MCP (2025)
#209How does this compare with playwright CLI? https://github.com/microsoft/playwright-cli
Re: Chrome DevTools MCP (2025)
#210Instead of giving agents browser primitives like snapshot, click, fill, I wrapped websites into CLI commands. It connects via CDP to a managed Chrome where you're already logged in, then runs small JS functions that call the site's own internal APIs. No headless browser, no stolen cookies, no API keys. Your browser is already the best place for fetch to happen. It has all the cookies, sessions, auth state. Traditional crawlers spend so much effort on login flows, CSRF tokens, CAPTCHAs, anti-bot detection... all of that just disappears when you fetch from inside the browser itself. Frontend engineers would probably hate me for this because it's really hard to defend against.
So instead of snapshot the DOM (easily 50K+ tokens), find element, click, snapshot again, parse... you just run
bb-browser site twitter/feed
and get structured JSON back.Here's the thing I keep thinking about though. Operating websites through raw CDP is a genuinely hard problem. A model needs to understand page structure, find the right elements, handle dynamic loading, deal with SPAs. That takes a SOTA model. But calling a CLI command? Any model can do that. So the SOTA model only needs to run once, to write the adapter. After that, even a small open-source model runs "bb-browser site reddit/hot" just fine.
And not everyone even needs to write adapters themselves. I created a community repo, bb-sites (https://github.com/epiral/bb-sites), where people freely contribute adapters for different websites. So in a sense, someone with just an open-source model can already feel the real impact of agents in their daily workflow. Agents shouldn't be a privilege only for people who can access SOTA models and afford the token costs.
There's a guide command baked in so if you do want to add a new site, you can tell your agent "turn this website into a CLI" and it reverse-engineers the site's APIs and writes the adapter.
v0.8.x dropped the Chrome extension entirely. Pure CDP, managed Chrome instance. "npm install -g bb-browser" and it works.