Let your AI agent see and interact with your live Chrome session — the tabs you already have open, your logged-in accounts, your current page state. No browser automation framework, no separate browser instance, no re-login.

Works out of the box with any Chrome installation. One toggle to enable, nothing else to install.

Most browser automation tools launch a fresh, isolated browser. This one connects to the Chrome you're already running, so your agent can:

• Read pages you're logged into (Gmail, GitHub, internal tools, ...)
• Interact with tabs you're actively working in
• See the actual state of a page mid-workflow, not a clean reload

pi install git:github.com/pasky/chrome-cdp-skill@v1.0.1

Clone or copy the skills/chrome-cdp/ directory wherever your agent loads skills or context from. The only runtime dependency is Node.js 22+ — no npm install needed.

Navigate to chrome://inspect/#remote-debugging and toggle the switch. That's it.

The CLI auto-detects Chrome, Chromium, Brave, Edge, and Vivaldi on macOS, Linux, and Windows. If your browser stores DevToolsActivePort in a non-standard location, set the CDP_PORT_FILE environment variable to the full path.

scripts/cdp.mjs list # list open tabs scripts/cdp.mjs shot <target> # screenshot → runtime dir scripts/cdp.mjs snap <target> # accessibility tree (compact, semantic) scripts/cdp.mjs html <target> [".selector"] # full HTML or scoped to CSS selector scripts/cdp.mjs eval <target> "expression" # evaluate JS in page context scripts/cdp.mjs nav <target> https://... # navigate and wait for load scripts/cdp.mjs net <target> # network resource timing scripts/cdp.mjs click <target> "selector" # click element by CSS selector scripts/cdp.mjs clickxy <target> <x> <y> # click at CSS pixel coordinates scripts/cdp.mjs type <target> "text" # type at focused element (works in cross-origin iframes) scripts/cdp.mjs loadall <target> "selector" # click "load more" until gone scripts/cdp.mjs evalraw <target> <method> [json] # raw CDP command passthrough scripts/cdp.mjs open [url] # open new tab (triggers Allow prompt) scripts/cdp.mjs stop [target] # stop daemon(s)

<target> is a unique prefix of the targetId shown by list.

chrome-devtools-mcp reconnects on every command, so Chrome's "Allow debugging" modal can re-appear repeatedly and target enumeration times out with many tabs open. chrome-cdp holds one persistent daemon per tab — the modal fires once, and it handles 100+ tabs reliably.

Connects directly to Chrome's remote debugging WebSocket — no Puppeteer, no intermediary. On first access to a tab, a lightweight background daemon is spawned that holds the session open. Chrome's "Allow debugging" modal appears once per tab; subsequent commands reuse the daemon silently. Daemons auto-exit after 20 minutes of inactivity.

This approach is also why it handles 100+ open tabs reliably, where tools built on Puppeteer often time out during target enumeration.