Comment by yan5xu

I built something in this space, bb-browser (https://github.com/epiral/bb-browser). Same CDP connection, but the approach is honestly kind of cheating.

Instead 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.