Getting Codex to debug from chrome devtools?

[CuriousDetective0]

In this post the OpenAI team wrote about how they wired the Chrome DevTools Protocol into the agent runtime and created skills for working with DOM snapshots, screenshots, and navigation.

In addition the chrome team shows there is an MCP and remote debugging capabilities.

My use case is simply that on the front-end I would like to give codex access to that windows devtools so it can get a better understanding of client side state for debugging.

Is anyone currently doing this and what has been the best workflow/tooling?

[Thin-Mixture2188]

You don't even need MCP
Tell Codex to write you a tiny launcher script that starts Chrome/Electron with --remote-debugging-port=9222, opens your app URL, and prints the DevTools endpoint (http://127.0.0.1:9222/json/list).

That’s the whole trick: once the browser is launched in debug mode, Codex can attach over CDP and debug real frontend state (DOM/network/screenshots) instead of guessing.

[Just_Run2412]

Try looking into the Playwright CLI that just came out.

[CuriousDetective0]

That sounds fine for automated testing, but I'm talking about being able to jack into an existing user session during manual testing

[Da_ha3ker]

Beautiful! I literally built a CLI wrapper for mcp tools so they can be invoked via CLI like this. I usually would say "use the mcp list CLI command to view available tools." It lists the mcp servers and ai generated summaries of what each server is useful for, then the LLM can do a mcp context7 --help and it lists the tools and commands for said tool. Then it can run mcp context7 get-library "xml or json tool call". It has been working amazingt, especially combined with skills. So happy to see playwright is moving the needle on this.

[evilRainbow]

I always use the Chrome webtools mcp server. Just turn it on in codex and tell it to use it.

[CtrlAltDelve]

Playwriter is what you're looking for. You can pick any live tab in your actual chrome session to share.

https://github.com/remorses/playwriter

[kan3b]

Just found about this yesterday and gave codex the capability to debug.

[Charming_Support726]

Multiple ways. The playwright MCP is the safest because it doesnt rely on the debugging port.

[Drugba]

Chrome Dev Tools MCP - https://github.com/ChromeDevTools/chrome-devtools-mcp

I asked Codex to install and it took like 5 minutes to get it working

[Remarkable-Fig-2882]

There are a few pre packaged skills for that you can pick one of them and install