WICK — Browser-grade access for AI agents

5 min read Original article ↗

SIGNAL ACQUIRED · AGENT-GRADE ACCESS · v1.0

The web your agent can't see — unveiled.

Modern sites fingerprint every request your agent makes and quietly serve it a lesser web — 403s, CAPTCHAs, degraded content. Wick runs locally, speaks the same protocol real browsers do, and exits from your own IP. The page your agent fetches is the same page you see.

$ brew tap wickproject/wick && brew install wick ⧉ copy

LAT 37.7749 LON -122.419 T+00:14:08 SWEEP 0x2F

41°24'N · 02°11'E ◈ GET /202 OK { agent: "you" } TLS · ch+1.3

Signal

clear

integrity · 99.7%

Descend

01 · Diagnosis

Your agent is given a redacted web.

Anti-bot systems fingerprint at the TLS layer, HTTP layer, JS layer — dozens of signals in the first hundred milliseconds. Your agent's requests don't match any real browser's, so the site serves a CAPTCHA, a 403, or a lobotomized version of the page. You built the agent to read the internet; it is reading a suggestion of it.

02 · Remedy

Wick un-redacts it.

Wick sits on your machine, routes the fetch through the same stack real Chrome uses, and exits from your own residential IP with your own cookies. To the site, there is no agent. There is only you, browsing. Every bit the site would show a human, it shows your agent.

GET · https://nytimes.com/breaking INTERCEPT · 0x7A9F

Raw intercept · bot-detected

403 Forbidden · access denied by perimeter

With Wick · 200 OK · 614ms

Content delivered in full › BREAKING — The Justice Department is examining   whether the proposed merger satisfies   antitrust conditions imposed in March… › ICE arrests topped 1,100/day on average   through Q1, according to internal memos   obtained by our newsroom this morning. [ + 2,847 more words · clean markdown ]

Capabilities

Six instruments. One clean signal.

Everything required to put a real browser's access behind your agent's fetch call — and nothing that phones home.

I · 001

Browser-grade fingerprint

The TLS handshake, HTTP/2 frames, header ordering, JA3/JA4 — indistinguishable from a real Chrome session because it uses the same networking stack.

I · 002

Runs on your machine

No cloud proxy, no third-party servers, no middleman. The binary lives on your laptop. Requests and responses never leave your network.

I · 003

Markdown, not noise

Raw HTML wastes tokens. Wick strips chrome, ads, and scaffolding and returns structured markdown your model can actually reason over.

I · 004

Your IP, your cookies

No pooled residential exit networks. Requests carry your signals because you are the one making them — through the agent you wrote.

I · 005

MCP-native

Works out of the box with Claude Code, Cursor, Windsurf, and any MCP-compatible client. One install and your agent gains wick_fetch.

I · 006

Search built in

wick_search issues real browser queries and returns clean result sets. Pair with wick_fetch for end-to-end research.

Anatomy of a fetch

From agent call to rendered page.

01

Agent calls

Your MCP client invokes wick_fetch(url) — no SDK, no API key.

02

Local resolve

Wick's daemon accepts the call on 127.0.0.1. Nothing leaves the machine yet.

03

Browser stack

The request goes out through Chromium's real network layer — TLS, HTTP/2, everything.

04

Clean return

Response is extracted, boilerplate stripped, handed back as markdown with metadata.

How Wick compares

Against every other way your agent reads the web.

  Wick Firecrawl Bright Data Browserbase Playwright
Anti-bot bypass ●●○part○○
JavaScript rendering ●●●●●
Runs locally ●○○○●
Your residential IP ●○pool○●
Markdown output ●●●○○
No cloud round-trip ●○○○●
Paid starting at $0$19/mometered$150/mo$0

All free · MIT

One version. Everything included.

Wick is unified open source. TLS fingerprinting, JS rendering, stealth patches, auto-CAPTCHA, residential tunneling — all free, all in one binary.

Wick · open source

$0

Everything. For individual developers, teams, and automated fleets alike.

  • ▸ Browser-grade TLS fingerprint (Cronet)
  • ▸ JavaScript rendering (CEF) — auto-detected
  • ▸ 20+ stealth patches against anti-bot fingerprinting
  • ▸ CAPTCHA handling (user-in-the-loop, or BYO CapSolver key for auto-solve)
  • ▸ Residential IP tunneling
  • ▸ Clean markdown extraction
  • ▸ MCP server for all major clients
  • ▸ Persistent cookie vault
  • ▸ robots.txt compliance
  • ▸ Open source (MIT)

Deploy

Install in seconds. Any platform.

01

Tap and install via Homebrew

brew tap wickproject/wick && brew install wick

02

Autoconfigure your clients

Detects Claude Code, Cursor, Windsurf, and other MCP clients.

wick setup

03

Use

Your agent now has wick_fetch and wick_search. Search the web, read any page — clean markdown returned.

01

One-line installer

curl -fsSL https://wickproject.github.io/wick/apt/install.sh | bash

Or add the APT repo manually:

echo "deb [trusted=yes] https://wickproject.github.io/wick/apt stable main" \
  | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/wick.list
sudo apt update && sudo apt install wick

03

Use

Agent gains wick_fetch and wick_search.

01

Install via npm

Works anywhere Node.js does.

npm install -g wick-mcp

03

Use

Agent gains wick_fetch and wick_search.

Interoperable with every major MCP client

Light the wick.

Fully open source (MIT). Every feature — free. Contribute, fork, build on it.