It's probably not fully optimized and could be compacted more with just some effort, and further with clever techniques, but browser state/session data will always use up a ton of tokens because it's a ton of data. There's not really a way around that. AI's have a surprising "intuition" about problems that often help them guess at solutions based on insufficient information (and they guess correctly more often than I expect they should). But when their intuition isn't enough and you need to feed them the real logs/data...it's always gonna use a bunch of tokens.

This is one place where human intuition helps a ton today. If you can find the most relevant snippets and give the AI just the right context, it does a much better job.

https://github.com/microsoft/playwright-cli and https://agent-browser.dev/

i'm experimenting with a different approach (no CDP/ARIA trees, just Chrome extension messaging that returns a numbered list of interactive elements). Way lighter on tokens and undetectable but still very experimental : https://github.com/DimitriBouriez/navagent-mcp

Yes. CLI. Always CLI. Never MCP. Ever. You’re welcome.