Hacker News Reader

Comment by aadishv | Hacker News Reader

Someone already made a great agent skill for this, which I'm using daily, and it's been very cool!

https://github.com/pasky/chrome-cdp-skill

For example, I use codex to manage a local music library, and it was able to use the skill to open a YT Music tab in my browser, search for each album, and get the URL to pass to yt-dlp.

Do note that it only works for Chrome browsers rn, so you have to edit the script to point to a different Chromium browser's binary (e.g. I use Helium) but it's simple enough

View on HN

On one hand, cool demo, on the other, this is horrifying in more ways than I can begin to describe. You're literally one prompt injection away from someone having unlimited access to all of your everything.

Of course I still watch it and have my finger on the escape key at all times :)

For now you are. All these things fall with time, of course. You will stop caring once you start feeling safe, we all do.

Also. AAarrgh, my new thing to be annoyed at is AI drivel written slop.

"No browser automation framework, no separate browser instance, no re-login."

Oh really, nice. No separate computer either? No separate power station, no house, no star wars? No something else we didn't ask for? Just one a toggle and you go? Whoaaaaaa.

Edit: lol even the skill itself is vibe coded:

Lightweight Chrome DevTools Protocol CLI. Connects directly via WebSocket — no Puppeteer, works with 100+ tabs, instant connection.

I feel like there's nothing fucking left on the internet anymore that is not some mean of whatever the LLM is trained to talk like now.

What can you do? I mentioned the use of AI on another thread, asking essentially the same question. The comment was flagged, presumably as off topic. Fair enough, I guess. But about 80% (maybe more) of posted blogs etc that I see on HN now have very obvious signs of AI. Comments do too. I hate it. If I want to see what Claude thinks I can ask it.

HN is becoming close to unusable, and this isn’t like the previous times where people say it’s like reddit or something. It is inundated with bot spam, it just happens the bot spam is sufficiently engaging and well-written that it is really hard to address.

I hear you and I agree. I don't know. Gated communities?

Could you just be paranoid about it and seeing things where they aren’t? I can’t imagine someone using AI to comment on HN!

I am in awe of the confidence you have in your reflexes.

You get used to it :) And especially once you get used to the YOLO lifestyle, you end up realizing that practically any form of security is entirely worthless when you're dealing with a 200 IQ brainwashed robot hacker.

I think using the Pi coding agent really got me used to this way of thinking: https://mariozechner.at/posts/2025-11-30-pi-coding-agent/#to...

Not the person you're replying to, but: I just use a separate, dedicated Chrome profile that isn't logged into anything except what I'm working on. Then I keep the persistence, but without commingling in a way that dramatically increases the risk.

edit: upon rereading, I now realize the (different) prompt injection risk you were calling out re: the handoff to yt-dlp. Separate profiles won't save you from that, though there are other approaches.

Even without the bash escape risk (which can be mitigated with the various ways of only allowing yt-dlp to be executed), YT Music is a paid service gated behind a Google account, with associated payment method. Even just stealing the auth cookie is pretty serious in terms of damage it could do.

Agreed. I wouldn't cut loose an agent that's at risk of prompt injection w/ unscoped access to my primary Google account.

But if I understood the original commenter's use case, they're just searching YT Music to get the URL to a given song. This appears[0] to work fine without being logged in. So you could parameterize or wrap the call to yt-dlp and only have your cookie jar usable there.

[0]: https://music.youtube.com/search?q=sandstorm

[1]: https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=XjvkxXblpz8

Oh, that's true, even allows you to play without an account. I can swear that at some point it flat out refused any use unless you're logged in with an account that has YT Music (I remember having to go to regular YouTube to get the same song to send it to someone who didn't have it).

That's also my approach, built quickly a cli for this with lightweight session management

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47207790

As long as it’s gated and not turned on by default, it’s all good. They could also add a warning/sanity check similar to “allow pasting” in the console.

> Most browser automation tools launch a fresh, isolated browser. This one connects to the Chrome you're already running

Is this the same as what Claude in Chrome does?

I tried that for a while and since I use Firefox and Chromium, the security problem of it seeing your tabs wasn't a big deal. Fresh Chrome install, only ever used for this exact purpose. Plus you can watch it working in real (actually very slow) time so if you did point it at something risky you can take over at any point.

For actual testing of web apps though, a skill with playwright cli in headless mode is much more effective. About 1-2k context per interaction after a bit of tuning.

To be clear, this isn't a skill for the devtools mcp, but an independent project. It doesn't look bad, but obviously browser automation + agents is a very busy space with lots of parallel efforts.

DevTools MCP and its new CLI are maintained by the team behind Chrome DevTools & Puppeteer and it certainly has a more comprehensive feature set. I'd expect it to be more reliable, but.. hey open source competition breeds innovation and I love that. :)

(I used to work on the DevTools team. And I still do, too)

Does anyone really use these hacked up with duct tape skills? why not use something more reliable like playwriter.dev?

Mhh, yt-dlp already has a build in youtube search, could you not use that instead of anything with AI?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com