Give your AI agent access to your live Chrome session — works out of the box, connects to tabs you already have open

chrome-cdp

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.

Why this matters

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

Installation

As a pi skill

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

For other agents (Amp, Claude Code, Cursor, etc.)

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.

Enable remote debugging in Chrome

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.

Usage

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

`` is a unique prefix of the targetId shown by list.

Why not chrome-devtools-mcp?

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.

How it works

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.