Show HN: Chromectl – CLI to give an AI agent its own Chrome session

2 points

3 months ago

Most browser automation tools (Playwright MCP and similar) create a browser process owned by the agent. chromectl flips that: you start a named session, and the agent connects to it. The session is isolated — no cookies, no saved logins, no way for the agent to wander into your banking tab.

This also unlocks human handoff. Start a session, navigate to a site, log in manually, then hand control back to Claude. Useful for anything behind auth that you don't want to automate credentials for. Each session gets a dedicated Chrome profile. Stop it, start it again tomorrow, you're still logged in.

Claude Desktop can drive Chrome too, but it requires a plugin and works inside your main browser profile — there's no way to scope it to a clean session.

Cloudflare and Anthropic have both written about why agents work better through code than through tool definitions — MCP front-loads every tool description into context whether it's used or not. A CLI is lighter still: give Claude a terminal and `--help`, and it figures out the rest. No tool schemas, no context bloat.

Standard stuff like navigate, eval, screenshot, and scrape is there, plus `pick` — click any element on a live page and get back its selector, HTML, and computed styles as JSON. Paste into Claude and say "fix this."

Sharing in case it's useful — curious how others are handling the browser problem with agents.

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Sources: - Cloudflare Code Mode: https://blog.cloudflare.com/code-mode-mcp/ - Anthropic on code execution with MCP: https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/code-execution-with-mc...