@hover-dev/core

The local Node service. Owns:

• Agent invocation (src/agents/) — Local CLI Agent First. Spawns claude / codex / cursor / ... and normalizes their output into a single InvokeEvent stream.
• Playwright preflight (src/playwright/) — verifies CDP connection to the user's Chrome.
• Smoke test (src/smoke.ts) — end-to-end verification of the whole chain.

Architecture (agents/)

"Local CLI Agent First" — Hover bundles no AI runtime. It spawns whichever coding-agent CLI is on the user's PATH and normalizes its output to a single event stream:

| File | Purpose | |---|---| | types.ts | AgentDescriptor, InvokeOptions, InvokeEvent, protocol/format enums, error classes | | registry.ts | AGENTS constant — single source of truth for supported agents | | detect.ts | detectAgents(), resolveBinForAgent(), resolveOnPath() — PATH scanning | | argv.ts | buildArgv() — protocol-aware argv construction, throws UnsupportedAgentProtocolError for acp / pi-rpc | | invoke.ts | invokeAgent() — async-iterable spawning + stdout streaming | | claude.ts | Claude Code descriptor: claude -p, stream-json parser, sandbox flags |

To add an agent: implement an AgentDescriptor, register it in registry.ts. Done.

Smoke test

# Terminal 1: run basic-app — also spawns a debug Chrome (the example sets
# `autoLaunchChrome: true`) navigated to http://localhost:5173
pnpm dev:example:basic-app   # from repo root

# Terminal 2: run the smoke test
pnpm smoke                   # from repo root, defaults to http://localhost:5173

Need the debug Chrome standalone (no example)? pnpm smoke:chrome (or pnpm exec hover-chrome).

Override the target or prompt:

pnpm smoke http://localhost:5173/ "log in then add a todo named 'verify hover'"

Environment variables:

• HOVER_CDP — CDP URL (default http://localhost:9222)
• HOVER_AGENT — agent id (omit to auto-detect; tries the user's stated preference, then the first installed agent in registry order — claude → codex today)
• HOVER_MODEL — model for the agent (default sonnet, much cheaper than opus)

Sandboxing (what the smoke test enforces)

The claude -p invocation is locked down so Claude can only drive the browser:

• --strict-mcp-config — ignore any MCP servers in ~/.claude/ or .mcp.json
• --allowedTools mcp__playwright — only Playwright MCP is callable
• --disallowedTools Bash Edit Write Read Grep Glob Task WebFetch WebSearch — every built-in tool explicitly denied
• --permission-mode dontAsk — anything not whitelisted aborts the run
• --max-budget-usd 0.50 — hard ceiling per session

Together these enforce the rule that the spawned agent can only reach the browser via Playwright MCP — never the host filesystem, shell, or network. A hijacked prompt or hallucinated destructive action has nowhere to land.