The Dark Arts of Web Automation: Teaching Agents to Use Websites Like Humans

Anything you can do in a browser, your agent can do too. Not by tiptoeing through an MCP server one polite, token-burning call at a time -- properly, programmatically, the way you'd drive any other tool. I'll show you how with chrome-agent, an open source wrapper over the Chrome DevTools Protocol that has become irreplaceable in my everyday work. If you'll ever do a browser task more than once, step-by-step MCP browsing is slow, brittle, and bills you tokens for every single click. A CLI straight onto CDP makes the whole browser programmable: loop it, pipe it, script it, walk away. Write it Tuesday, run it a thousand times Wednesday, all without a second of AI agent babysitting. We'll dispel the MCP hype and myths, with successful demonstrations of cheeky things like: the power of CLI-based browsing and how its so much more capable than mere MCP; reaching through those oh-so-clever cross-origin iframes to clear the verify you're human checkboxes; showing that a JavaScript .click() is not a click, rather, just a function call in a costume that is banhammerable; ultimately, proving that a CDP browser operates just like a meatbag with a mouse and keyboard. You'll learn how to point your AI agents at real, messy, uncooperative websites and web applications and have them get things done exactly the way that you would.