Dev forks Chromium with Claude Code to build agent-first browser Shuttle
sabotizer · reddit · 2026-11-09
A developer who uses Claude Code for browser automation forked Chromium to build Shuttle, an agent-first browser solving chrome-devtools-mcp pain points: throwaway instances, remote-debugging prompts, the automation banner, untracked tabs, agents stealing each other's tabs, and 4GB of RAM from multiple processes.
Key design:
- Each agent is a named identity (name/color/avatar) with its own storage; logins persist across restarts
- Built-in loopback-only MCP server works with any client (Claude Code, Codex, Cursor)
- Color-coded tab groups show what each agent is doing
- No DX friction: no dialogs, no banner, navigator.webdriver=false
- Secrets never enter context: save-text returns only length + hash
- Throwaway agents keep cookies in memory, deleted after 15 min idle
- 37% of the Chromium source tree removed (Google sign-in, telemetry, Translate, etc.)
Build process: 43 commits over two weeks, mostly written by Claude Code; five agents (mostly Opus 5.5 and Fable 5.1) across three devices, lead agent curating sessions under 300k context; removals done as scout → 3-5 surgery sub-agents with a strict keep-list (biggest batch: 5,572 files / 1.18M lines); adversarial reviews before every commit. Merging Chromium 155 brought 453 conflicted files, resolved in 20 minutes with 5 parallel sub-agents — then a full day of builds. Open source.
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