I use Helium (a Chromium fork) as my only browser, and I wanted coding agents to work in it with my logins and profiles, without taking over my tabs. Most browser automation tools launch a fresh Chromium instead, so I made hba. It's a CLI that talks to the browser you already have open, over its DevTools port: hba open github.com/notifications # opens in the agent's own background tab hba snap -i # accessibility tree with refs: - link "Inbox" [ref=e12] hba click e12 # real mouse input, prints what changed hba close # closes only the tabs it opened Some details: A small daemon keeps one DevTools connection open, so reads take 3 to 20 ms and a click that loads a page takes about half a second. Each agent session owns the tabs it opened. Your own tabs are off limits until you hand one over with hba tab use t42. DevTools from the shell: console, network log and response bodies, request blocking and mocking, HAR, performance traces, CPU profiles, coverage. Unpacked extension development: load, reload, service worker logs and errors, storage, and driving the popup like a page. Websites see an ordinary browser. It doesn't enable the Runtime domain on websites, its page code runs in an isolated world, and input is trusted mouse and keyboard events with human timing. Snapshots and selectors use Playwright's injected script, vendored and pinned. Compared with browser-use and agent-browser: those are portable and usually run a browser of their own. hba only does one thing, driving your running Helium carefully, and adds DevTools and extension tooling they don't cover. It's written in Rust, Apache-2.0, and Linux plus Helium only for now. Coding agents get a skill file that teaches them the commands, and the README has a one-paste install prompt for agents. https://github.com/saatvik333/helium-browser-agent Feedback and bug reports welcome. Support for other Chromium browsers is the obvious next step if people want it.   submitted by   /u/saatvik333 [link]   [comments]