brocogni

An AI agent with a browser is powerful. An AI agent that understands what it sees in the browser is unstoppable.

Brocogni is an open-source MCP server that sits between your AI agent and Playwright. Instead of dumping raw HTML into your agent's context (noisy, fragile, token-wasting), it compiles pages into a structured semantic map the agent can navigate, reason about, and act on in real time.

Two modes:

• Agentic browsing loop -- The agent calls Brocogni tools directly: navigate, observe, click, extract, diff. Each step feeds back into reasoning. The browser is the environment, the agent is the brain.

• Self-healing script generation -- The agent observes a page and generates vanilla Playwright code with automatic fallback selectors that survive frontend rebuilds.

No SaaS. No data leaves your machine. MIT.

▶️ Watch the 15-second demo

Before / After

Before -- fragile selectors that break on every deploy:

await page.click('.btn-primary');
await page.fill('.css-x83kf2 > input', 'hello');

Works today. Fails tomorrow when Tailwind classes rebuild.

After -- semantic selectors with self-healing fallbacks:

await page.click('role=button[name="Sign in"]');
await page.fill('role=textbox[name="Email"]', 'hello');

If the primary selector breaks, the fallback chain handles it:

role=button[name='Sign in']
  -> button:has-text('Sign in')
  -> xpath=//button[contains(text(),'Sign in')]
  -> css=div:has(> button) + button

The engine anchors unnamed elements to named siblings using relational XPath and CSS adjacent selectors. If a button has no accessible name but sits next to a labeled input, Brocogni finds it anyway.

Related MCP server: Plasmate

How it works

AI Agent
   |
   | MCP protocol (stdio)
   v
Brocogni MCP Server
   |
   | Playwright + CDP
   v
 AX Tree  -->  DOM Geometry  -->  Selector Engine
                                       |
                                       v
                         Self-healing selectors
                         (ARIA / CSS / XPath / relational)

The agent calls MCP tools in a loop: navigate to a URL, observe the page as structured semantic nodes, find targets by role or name, click to trigger new states, diff before/after to catch dynamic content. Actionable nodes carry role, name, bounding box, visibility, enabled state, and ranked selectors with fallback chains. The agent never sees raw HTML.

Benchmark

Brocogni is 81% cheaper than @playwright/mcp for the full workflow: observe → act → export a working Playwright script.

The ref iteration problem

@playwright/mcp returns a raw AX tree with temporary refs (e5, e10). Refs work inside the MCP session. When the LLM wants to export a persistent script, they expire.

@playwright/mcp                          Brocogni
──────────────                            ────────
Try 1: write ref-based script             Try 1: copy pre-computed selectors
       → refs expire, script broken              → #search-input works
Try 2: re-observe, guess getByRole               → One shot. Done.
       → 75% correct
Try 3: debug failed selectors
       → script finally works

Cost: $0.04 per script                    Cost: $0.01 per script
(3 attempts, trial & error)               (1 attempt, one-shot)

Cost at scale

Pricing based on Claude Sonnet 4 ($3/M input, $15/M output).

Signal density

@playwright/mcp gives the LLM raw data and says "figure it out." Brocogni gives the LLM understanding and says "here's what to do."

Install

npx playwright install chromium
npx browser-cognition-mcp

Then connect your agent:

Claude Code

claude mcp add brocogni -- npx -y browser-cognition-mcp

Cursor

Settings -> Features -> MCP -> Add New
Name: brocogni  |  Type: stdio  |  Command: npx -y browser-cognition-mcp

Claude Desktop

npx browser-cognition-mcp install

OpenCode Zero setup -- reads opencode.json automatically.

MCP Tools

Also exposes a write-robust-playwright-script prompt that teaches agents how to use these tools effectively.

Tests

npm test

Deterministic, no browser required. Covers semantic extraction, DOM fusion, selector ranking, relational fallbacks, delta computation, and action verification.

FAQ

Does it need API keys? No. Every observation runs locally. No accounts, no telemetry, no data leaves your machine.

Which agents does it work with? Any MCP-compatible agent: Claude Code, Claude Desktop, Cursor, OpenCode, and others.

Does it add runtime bloat to my project? No. Brocogni is a dev-time MCP server. It generates vanilla Playwright code -- no runtime dependencies introduced.

What happens when a selector fails? The fallback chain activates automatically. ARIA -> text -> XPath -> relational sibling. The agent tries each one in order.

Contributing

Bug reports, feature requests, and PRs welcome. See CONTRIBUTING.md. Security issues? SECURITY.md.

License

MIT. Go build something.