Show HN: Playwright Skill for Claude Code – Less context than playwright-MCP (github.com)

Why not just ask the agent to use Playwright via CLI? That’s what I do and it works fine. With Codex anyway

Edit: oops that’s what you did too. Yes most MCP shouldn’t be used.

This was on my TODO list for the week, thanks for sharing!

Now I just need to make a skill for using Jira and I can go back to the MCP-free life.

MCPs are deterministic, SKILLS.md isn't. Also run.js can run arbitrarily generated Node.js code. It is a trivial vector for command injection.

This might be sufficient for an independent contractor or student. It shouldn't be used in a production agent.

I think that this is actually the biggest threat to the current "AI bubble." Model efficiency and diffusion of models to open source. It's probably to start hedging bets on Nvidia

I have a few questions about test frameworks that use AI services like this.

1)The examples always seem very generic: "Test Login Functionality, check if search works, etc". Do these actually work well at all once you step outside of the basic smoketest use cases?

2) How to you prevent proprietary data from being read when you are just foisting snapshots over to the AI provider? There's no way I'd be able to use this in any kind of real application where data privacy is a constraint.

I'm using Playwright so much right now. All of the good LLMs appear to know the API really well.

Using Claude Code I'll often prompt something like this:

"Start a python -m http.server on port 8003 and then use Playwright Python to exercise this UI, there's a console error when you click the button, click it and then read that error and then fix it and demonstrate the fix"

This works really well even without adding an extra skill.

I think one of the hardest parts of skill development is figuring out what to put in the skill that produces better results than the model acting alone.

Have you tried iteratively testing the skill - building it up part by part and testing along the way to see if the different sections genuinely help improve the model's performance?

Thanks, I have installed it and it works great!

Related anecdote: some months ago I tried to coax the Playwright MCP to do a full page screenshot and it couldn't do it. Then I just told Claude Code to write a Playwright JS script to do that and it worked at the first try.

Taking into account all the tools crap that the Playwright MCP puts in your context window and the final result I think this is the way to go.

How does this compare to using chrome-devtools mcp? I've been using that for validating UI flows and I haven't hit limits with Claude yet

I am using Tmux lynx browser MCP for sites that don't need JavaScript

I have created a simple .sh command to do the testing using browser-use and add how to prompt this command in CLAUDE.md because it has to run a shell command, it is more deterministic than Skills. And it uses near to zero of context window compared to MCP.

Recently, I have found myself getting more interested in shell commands than MCPs. There is no need to set it up. Debugging is far easier. And I would be free to use whichever model I like ot use for a specific function. For example, for Playwright, I use GPT-5 just because I have free credits. I could save my Claude Code Quota for more important tasks.

Heh BrowserBase and Browser-Use exist specifically because this is a harder problem than it looks. Any approach will work for the first couple actions, that hard parts are long strings of actions that depend on the results of previous actions, compressing the context and knowing what to send, and having your tools work across all the edge cases (e.g. date picker fields, file upload fields, cross origin iframes, etc.).

How do images affect context? Does an image run separately on another model and returns a text description of it that ends up smaller than the accessibility text tree?

i just use https://github.com/ravitemer/mcphub.nvim and enable/disable the mcps i want

This is brilliant.

If you're willing to have Claude write code to test a thing you could do a teeny bit more work and make that Playwright script a permanent part of your codebase. Then, the script can run in your CI on every build, and you can keep enhancing it as your product changes so it keeps proving that area of your product works as desired.

Have it run inside a harness that spins up its own server & stack (DB etc.) and boom - you now have an end-to-end test suite!

Working on this problem but a combo of a skill and an mcp better suited to playwright is the solution IMO.

The issue is for many things playwright is really verbose, by better tailoring outputs and making them more fine grained you’ll get less context bloat and allow the llm to better work with the context. I’m making it open source.

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How does this compare to using the recently released chrome mcp?