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Let your Coding Agent debug the browser session with Chrome DevTools MCP

developer.chrome.com

98 points by xnx an hour ago · 20 comments

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aadishv an hour ago

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 an hour ago

    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.

    • mh- an hour ago

      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.

    • sheepscreek 18 minutes ago

      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.

    • aadishv an hour ago

      Of course I still watch it and have my finger on the escape key at all times :)

      • bergheim 31 minutes ago

        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 3 minutes ago

          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.

boomskats 15 minutes ago

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.

zxspectrumk48 28 minutes ago

I found this one working amazingly well (same idea - connect to existing session): https://github.com/remorses/playwriter

NiekvdMaas an hour ago

Also works nicely together with agent-browser (https://github.com/vercel-labs/agent-browser) using --auto-connect

speedgoose an hour ago

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/

Yokohiii an hour ago

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.

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