browser_session — multi-step browser automation

A web claw on steroids. While web is a one-shot Playwright wrapper good for "fetch this page and read it", browser_session hands the entire interaction loop to browser-use — a framework that keeps a persistent browser, decorates the DOM with numbered element IDs, and has its own LLM-driven planning loop to execute multi-step tasks.

When to use which

Why a super-skill

browser_session is the first member of LocalKin's super-skill pattern: skills that wrap a battle-tested third-party OSS framework (here, browser-use's 91K-star codebase) inside a thin SKILL.md adapter. The kinclaw kernel doesn't care that there's an entire LLM-driven planning agent inside; it just sees one tool call going in, one result coming out.

This is "thin soul, fat skill" pushed to its useful extreme:

• We don't reinvent browser-use. We host it.
• Other LocalKin souls (researcher / marketer / curator) can also enable browser_session and get the same capability.
• If browser-use ships a new version, we re-run setup.sh — the SKILL.md interface stays the same.

Setup details

./setup.sh:

1. Picks a Python ≥3.11 (homebrew, pyenv, or system) — browser-use doesn't support 3.10
2. Creates ./.venv/ (per-skill venv, isolated)
3. pip install browser-use playwright
4. playwright install chromium (~92 MB Chrome Headless Shell)
5. Verifies the imports work

The venv lives in ./.venv/. Add .venv/ to .gitignore so the ~500 MB of dependencies don't get committed.

LLM selection

The framework drives a real LLM internally. Pick one with vision support — browser-use feeds screenshots to the LLM for visual reasoning. Recommended (in descending preference):

1. claude-sonnet-4.5 via ANTHROPIC_API_KEY — current SOTA for browser-use's WebVoyager benchmark
2. gpt-4o via OPENAI_API_KEY — second-best, cheaper
3. Local Ollama with a vision model (e.g. qwen2.5-vl:7b) via OLLAMA_BASE_URL=http://localhost:11434 — free but ~3-5x slower per step; good for long batch runs you don't want to pay for

Set BROWSER_USE_MODEL=<name> to override the default for the selected provider.

Returns

stdout: the agent's final answer (a string — could be markdown if the task asked for structured output).

stderr: errors, warnings, the playwright/chromium boot noise.

Non-zero exit: agent failed or reported errors. The kernel will surface this as a tool error to the calling soul.

Costs

A typical 5-step task with Claude Sonnet:

• ~30-60 seconds wall-clock
• ~$0.05-0.15 in API tokens (browser-use sends DOM + screenshot at every step)

For dev/test use the local Ollama path; for production runs use Anthropic.