The Dark Arts of Web Automation: Teaching Agents to Use Websites Like Humans — Corey Gallon, Rexmore
CLI-based browser agents using Chrome DevTools Protocol outperform MCP for web automation on cost and speed
“A CDP browser is just like a meat bag with a mouse.”
Corey Gallon argues that AI agents driving Chrome via the DevTools Protocol are indistinguishable from human users, enabling them to bypass bot-detection systems like Cloudflare. He advocates for CLI-based tooling over MCP servers, citing an Arise AI study showing equivalent ~83% task success rates but with CLI winning on reuse, speed, and cost. The talk is a practical engineering playbook for agentic web automation, illustrated by the speaker nearly getting banned from OpenAI while preparing the demo.