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.

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

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?

I suggest to use https://github.com/simonw/rodney instead

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.

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

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.

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?

Note that this is a mega token guzzler in case you’re paying for your own tokens!

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

I have been using Playwright for a fairly long time now. Do checkout

I tell Claude to use playwright so I don't even need to do the setup myself.

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/

chrome-cli with remote developer port has been working fine this entire time.

Now that there's widespread direct connectivity between agents and browser sessions, are CAPTCHAs even relevant anymore?

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.