chrome-pilot

Agentic control of a real Chrome instance via CDP. Gives AI agents (or scripts) access to a fully authenticated browser with real cookies, sessions, and logins intact.

Headless browsers and bot frameworks get detected. Programmatic Chrome with a fresh profile has no sessions. This gives you the best of both: a real Chrome with your real profile, controllable via CDP and Playwright.

Useful for:

• AI agents that need to browse authenticated sites
• Reverse engineering APIs by capturing network traffic from a real session
• Automating workflows on sites with no API

pnpm install
chmod +x launch-chrome.sh

./launch-chrome.sh        # default port 9222
./launch-chrome.sh 9333   # custom port

This copies your real Chrome profile (cookies, logins, extensions) into a debug directory and launches Chrome with remote debugging enabled.

# Navigate and print title
node browse.js https://example.com

# Take a screenshot
node browse.js https://example.com --screenshot page.png

# Capture network traffic
node browse.js https://example.com --har traffic.json

# All at once
node browse.js https://example.com --screenshot page.png --har traffic.json

const { connect } = require('./browse');

const { browser, context, page } = await connect();

// Full Playwright API on a real, authenticated Chrome
await page.goto('https://example.com');
await page.click('button#login');
const text = await page.textContent('.result');
await page.screenshot({ path: 'out.png' });

await browser.close();

• CDP_PORT - Chrome debug port (default: 9222)

Chrome requires a non-default --user-data-dir for --remote-debugging-port. The launch script uses rsync to copy your real Chrome profile into /tmp/chrome-debug-profile, preserving all authentication state. On subsequent runs, it only syncs cookies and login data for speed.

Playwright connects via chromium.connectOverCDP(), giving you the full Playwright API on top of a real, authenticated Chrome instance. Traffic capture uses CDP sessions under the hood, so it works on the existing authenticated context (no separate incognito window).

macOS only (Chrome path is hardcoded to /Applications/Google Chrome.app). PRs welcome for Linux/Windows support.