pooriaarab agent-browser-consoles
Drive real advertising and cloud consoles with agent-browser.
These traps are not obvious from the CLI help.
Each one cost several wasted turns to rediscover.
Applies to Google Ads, Meta Events Manager, Reddit Ads, LinkedIn, and GA4.
1. Confirm which browser you drive
browser-attach fails silently.
The daily Chrome runs without --remote-debugging-port.
Chrome accepts that flag at launch only.
browser-attach does not error.
It launches its own browser and returns a plausible about:blank.
Always confirm the process before you drive it:
lsof -nP -iTCP -sTCP:LISTEN | grep -i google # pid + port
curl -s http://localhost:9334/json/list # should show YOUR page
A listener on 9222 is not proof of a DevTools endpoint.
One such listener answered 404 for /json.
2. Use the clone as the working route
Run ~/.agent-browser/bin/browser-clone-setup.sh personal.
Then launch real Chrome on ~/.agent-browser/real-profiles/personal with --remote-debugging-port=9334.
The clone is read-only on the source profile.
It is idempotent.
It carries live Google, Meta Business, LinkedIn, and Reddit sessions.
It needs no browser restart.
See agent-browser-profiles for the
AGENT_BROWSER_AUTO_CONNECT setting and the isolated-profile-vs-clone
tradeoff this step builds on.
3. Prefer snapshot refs over synthetic DOM events
Synthetic DOM events do nothing on React/Angular consoles.
On Reddit Ads signup dropdowns, element.click(), the native value setter plus input/change events, and a full dispatched pointerdown/mousedown/mouseup/click sequence all failed silently.
The value never changed.
No error was raised.
Only agent-browser click "@ref" against a ref from agent-browser snapshot worked.
Use refs for anything that must actually commit.
4. Pierce shadow DOM in Google Ads
Google Ads renders inside shadow DOM.
document.querySelectorAll cannot see its controls.
agent-browser click "text=View token" reports the element does not exist, even when the text appears in document.body.innerText.
Walk through shadow roots:
function walk(root, out){
var els = root.querySelectorAll('*');
for (var i=0;i<els.length;i++){
var e = els[i];
if (e.shadowRoot) walk(e.shadowRoot, out);
if (e.children.length===0 && /view token/i.test(e.textContent||'')) out.push(e);
}
return out;
}
5. Read the page before clicking a button by its label
Meta's Conversions API setup has two buttons both labelled "Generate access token". One sits inside a Dataset Quality API modal. One sits below the "without Dataset Quality API" radio. The modal path is irreversible. It states that once a dataset is configured for Quality API, opting out is not available. It preselected a different dataset than the one open in the list. Anchor on the surrounding control. Assert the target id before any click that commits.
6. Screenshot when text parsing disagrees with reality
Several times innerText said one thing and the rendered page said another.
A stale currency value.
A dialog that looked closed.
Take one screenshot.
It resolves each case faster than more eval calls.
7. Stop at attestations
Never make a legal statement on the operator's behalf. GA4's Measurement Protocol panel gates on "I have the necessary privacy disclosures and rights from my end users". Reddit's signup gates on a similar statement. An agent cannot truthfully assert that. Detect the attestation. Stop. Name the exact click the owner must make. Reddit's currency choice is similar: it "cannot be changed after sign up", so ask rather than default.
8. There is no mouse click; compose it
When refs and shadow-piercing both fail, fall back to a real pointer.
agent-browser mouse click does not exist — the subcommands are move, down, up, wheel.
Compose the click, using coordinates read from the element itself:
agent-browser eval "(function(){var e=/* find it */; var r=e.getBoundingClientRect();
return Math.round(r.x+r.width/2)+' '+Math.round(r.y+r.height/2);})()"
agent-browser mouse move <x> <y>
agent-browser mouse down
agent-browser mouse up
This opened a Meta collapsible that ignored element.click() and had no snapshot ref.
9. Curly apostrophes break text selectors
agent-browser click "text=Confirm your server's events..." fails when the page uses ’ (U+2019)
rather than '. The failure reads as a missing element, not an encoding problem.
Match on a substring that stops before the apostrophe, or find the node by regex in eval
and click it by coordinates.