DIY AI Browser with Chrome-Devtools MCP

Who needs an AI Browser when you can just use Aider-CE (Aider Community Experimentation) with Chrome Devtools to automate your browser with exactly the same result?

In the video I automate downloading some images for Halloween – for my SmartPoi project. It is pretty slow but I don’t think the AI browsers are much faster? Anyway the point is you can tell it to do something and then go away and do something important, like watching Anime.

Tech used:

1. Aider-ce in Navigator mode
   – this fork of Aider is coming on amazingly. I have started contributing myself to this amazing open source project, the best version of the best AI coding assistant imho.
   – you can use any other MCP capable AI assistant of course. (I previously had success with OpenCode)
2. Chrome-Devtools official MCP
3. Chrome Browser (I think it also works with Chromium?)

Method

tested on Arch linux

• Run browser with remote debugging: google-chrome-stable --remote-debugging-port=9222 --user-data-dir=/tmp/chrome-test

• Add Chrome Devtools to .aider.conf.yml file (at the bottom):

mcp-servers: |
  {
    "mcpServers": {
        "chrome-devtools": {
        "type": "stdio",
        "command": "npx",
        "args": ["-y", "chrome-devtools-mcp@latest", "--browser-url=http://127.0.0.1:9222"]
        }
    }
  }

• Run Aider-ce and use navigator mode. For me that looks like this:

aider --model deepseek/deepseek-reasoner --editor-model deepseek/deepseek-chat --disable-playwright --yes-always

/navigator

Example Prompt:

I have visualpoi.zone already open in connected Chrome Browser. Please search for and download the top 5 Halloween images

Video:

(no sound)