agent-hands

Hands for agent-browser. It navigates and reads; this clicks, types and scrolls at human rates. One CDP socket, a whole gesture dispatched at 60-100Hz, Fitts-law motion with Bezier paths and lognormal keystroke timing.

It never moves your physical cursor and never raises the window.

agent-browser --session work snapshot -i     # find the element
agent-hands fill "#searchbox_input" "auto ecole vincennes"
agent-hands press Enter
agent-browser --session work get url         # verify

Why

agent-browser hover emits exactly one mousemove that teleports to the target. Driving its mouse move from the shell lands events ~570ms apart, because each call spawns a process — geometrically plausible, temporally impossible. Behavioural scoring reads both as automation.

agent-hands holds one socket and paces the gesture itself:

| Gesture | agent-browser | agent-hands | |---|---|---| | move | 1 event, teleport | 25 events, median gap 16ms | | click | instant | Bezier arc, overshoot + correction, 72ms dwell | | type | — | dwell 62ms, flight 109ms | | scroll | — | wheel-like bursts with pauses |

Human reference: 60-125Hz sampling, 50-100ms dwell, 100-200ms flight.

When to reach for it

Escalate. Do not start here.

1. Throwaway browser — agent-browser --session scratch open <url>, no profile, no logins. Public pages, research, scraping. Most work belongs here, and agent-browser click is faster on it.
2. Logged-in profile — only when the task needs a real account.
3. agent-hands — only when 2 applies and the site can ban that account.

On a throwaway session this buys nothing. There is no account to lose.

Install

npm i -g agent-hands
agent-hands doctor          # checks the session is reachable

Requires Node 22 or newer for the built-in WebSocket. No dependencies.

Commands

click --ref @e12          click <selector>           click --text "Label"
click --xy 420 300        hover <selector>           move --xy 200 400
fill <target> "text"      fill … --append            type "text"
press Enter --times n     scroll 600                 where
doctor                    skills get core [--full]

--ref takes a ref from agent-browser snapshot -i. It is the most robust target and the only one that reaches inside a cross-origin iframe. fill replaces the field's contents. Set AGENT_HANDS_SESSION to skip --session on every call.

Flags: --session <name> (default work), --browser <name>, --user-data-dir <path>, --cdp <port|url>, --tab <match>, --no-activate, --speed 1.6 brisk / 0.7 slow, --json, --quiet.

Exit codes: 0 dispatched, 1 runtime failure, 2 usage error.

Your own browser

Chrome and Edge 144+ expose remote debugging without --remote-debugging-port. Open chrome://inspect/#remote-debugging or edge://inspect/#remote-debugging, tick Allow remote debugging for this browser instance, then:

agent-hands doctor --browser edge
agent-hands fill "#search" "hello" --browser edge --tab gmail

No restart, no lost tabs, and your logins are already there.

Browsers: chrome, chrome-beta, chrome-dev, chrome-canary, edge, edge-beta, edge-dev, edge-canary, chromium, brave, vivaldi, on Windows, macOS and Linux. Any other Chromium build works with --user-data-dir <path>.

--tab matches a title or url. An unmatched value lists what is open. Without it the visible tab wins.

That endpoint serves no /json/* routes, so nothing can discover targets over HTTP. They are read over the browser websocket with Target.getTargets instead, which works on both endpoint styles. Pooled sessions keep the per-page socket exactly as before.

The uuid on line 2 of DevToolsActivePort is mandatory here, and it changes every time the toggle is switched. A stale uuid times out exactly like a rejected one, so re-read the file rather than caching it.

The prompt, and why it is answered for you

The browser asks you to authorize every new CDP connection, and that approval cannot be persisted. Worse, it is drawn in the browser's own window chrome: CDP cannot see it and cannot dismiss it, so the websocket upgrade hangs with no error until somebody clicks. Clients with a short handshake timeout give up first — playwright-cli abandons it after 30s.

Two mitigations. A small background relay holds the one socket, so you approve once per browser run rather than once per command. And if agent-win is installed, the prompt is clicked for you while the handshake is pending, so a connect needs no human at all:

AGENT_WIN_HOME=/path/to/agent-win agent-hands doctor --browser edge

Without agent-win nothing breaks; the connect simply waits for you to click. AGENT_HANDS_NO_APPROVE=1 disables it outright.

That approver works in any UI language. It finds the dialog by Chromium's MdTextButton class, which is never translated, then picks the affirmative from a table of the word "Allow" in ~30 languages. It deliberately refuses to guess: the real dialog has three buttons — Disable in settings, Allow, Cancel — and Allow is neither first nor last, so choosing by position would disable your setting or refuse the connection. In an unlisted language it prints the buttons it saw and waits for you.

One caveat worth knowing: the prompt names no requester, so the approver clears any pending debugging prompt on the desktop. Do not run it while a connection you did not start is waiting.

Diagnosing a hang. A clean 404 on /json/version means the server is up and simply serves no /json/*. EOF while parsing means it is not answering at all — a pending prompt or a rotated uuid. Sending an Origin header turns the hang into a 403 naming --remote-allow-origins, which is a red herring: omitting Origin is what works.

A hidden tab is driven where it is and your foreground never changes. A tab frozen by the browser's memory saver cannot answer any command, so it is woken by bringing it forward for a moment and your previous tab is restored straight after. Page.setWebLifecycleState does not thaw a frozen tab and Emulation.setFocusEmulationEnabled hangs on one, so activation is the only route. --no-activate turns that flicker into an error instead.

--ref needs refs from agent-browser snapshot -i, which only exist for a pooled session. With --browser or --cdp, target by selector or --text.

Set AGENT_HANDS_CDP to skip --cdp on every call.

For agents

agent-hands skills get core --full

Serves the versioned guide bundled with the installed CLI, so instructions never drift from behaviour. --json gives one-line machine-readable results:

{"ok":true,"command":"click","points":14,"ms":392,"overshoot":true,"tag":"BUTTON"}
{"ok":false,"error":"no element matched selector \"#nope\"","code":"ENOTFOUND"}

Sessions

A session name pairs to one Chrome profile: work -> main, work-2 -> main-2. Chrome locks a profile directory, so one browser per profile. Give each parallel agent its own session.

Limits

Does not defeat Cloudflare Turnstile, DataDome, or PerimeterX — those combine behaviour with canvas, WebGL and TLS fingerprinting. 'webdriver' in navigator still returns true; hiding its value is the browser's init script, not this.

License

MIT