mcp-helm

Drive your real Chrome session from Claude — copilot mode, with handoff awareness.

Most browser-automation MCP servers spawn a fresh Playwright Chromium. That's useless when the work is "log into Stripe and click 5 things" — you don't have your cookies, your 2FA, your bookmarks. mcp-helm attaches to YOUR Chrome, the one you're already signed into, and lets Claude run a small set of tools against the active tab.

It also knows when to step back: when the page shows a 2FA prompt, captcha, payment confirmation, or biometric request, the screenshot tool flags it and Claude can call handoff() to wait for you.

Why this exists

The eyes-and-hands problem: Claude tells you "click Settings → API access" and you click Settings and there is no API access, so you screenshot back to Claude, which guesses again. That's 5 minutes of round-trips for a 5-second task, and it happens on every Stripe / Apple / Play Console / Cloudflare / Vercel setup.

mcp-helm cuts that loop. Claude sees the actual page, picks elements from the accessibility tree (no coordinate guessing), and stops when it would do something it shouldn't.

Install

npm install -g mcp-helm

Add to ~/.claude.json (or your MCP client's config):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "helm": {
      "command": "mcp-helm"
    }
  }
}

Usage

1. Launch a driveable Chrome

Add this alias to your shell rc:

alias chrome-pilot='open -a "Google Chrome" --args --remote-debugging-port=9222 --user-data-dir=$HOME/.chrome-pilot'

Run it once: chrome-pilot. A separate Chrome profile opens. Sign into everything you'd want Claude to drive (Play Console, Stripe, etc.). Cookies persist across launches — you only sign in once per service.

Why a separate profile? Your main Chrome can't be launched in remote-debugging mode while it's already running. The dedicated profile lives in ~/.chrome-pilot and stays separate from your daily browsing.

2. From Claude

You: Upload the AAB at <path> to Play Store internal testing.
Claude: [calls helm.attach] → [helm.navigate to play.google.com/console]
        [helm.screenshot] → sees the dashboard
        [helm.click "Personalized AI Portfolio Bot"]
        ... etc

If a 2FA prompt appears, screenshot returns handoffTriggers: ["2FA prompt"] and Claude calls handoff to wait.

Tools

Tool	Purpose
attach	Connect to Chrome on port 9222. Always call first.
list_tabs	List all open tabs.
focus_tab	Switch active tab by index or URL substring.
screenshot	PNG + URL + title + handoff triggers detected.
inspect	Numbered list of interactive elements (a11y tree).
click	Click by id (from inspect), text, or CSS selector. Returns changed: bool from screenshot diff.
type	Type into a field. submit: true presses Enter after.
navigate	Go to a URL.
wait_for	Wait for text or selector.
handoff	Pause and ask the human to take over.

Design choices

• Accessibility tree, not coordinates. Vision-grounded clicking (Anthropic computer use) is great but flaky on Retina displays and high-DPR scaling. The a11y tree gives stable, semantic IDs — and is what screen readers use.
• Screenshot diff after every click. If changed: false, the click was a no-op. Saves Claude from cheerfully reporting success.
• Handoff detection is regex-based, not LLM-based. Cheap, fast, no false positives on common login phrases.
• No tab-management heuristics. attach picks the first non-blank tab; use list_tabs + focus_tab to be precise. Predictable beats clever.

Status

v0.1 — works for simple flows (Play Console, Stripe dashboard, Vercel, Cloudflare). Edge cases this doesn't handle yet:

• Shadow DOM components (some web-component-heavy sites)
• iframes (need to surface frame switching)
• File uploads from disk
• Keyboard shortcuts beyond Enter

License

MIT