←back to thread

Show HN: Playwright Skill for Claude Code – Less context than playwright-MCP

(github.com)
186 points syntax-sherlock | 3 comments | 20 Oct 25 11:58 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source

I got tired of playwright-mcp eating through Claude's 200K token limit, so I built this using the new Claude Skills system. Built it with Claude Code itself.

Instead of sending accessibility tree snapshots on every action, Claude just writes Playwright code and runs it. You get back screenshots and console output. That's it.

314 lines of instructions vs a persistent MCP server. Full API docs only load if Claude needs them.

Same browser automation, way less overhead. Works as a Claude Code plugin or manual install.

Token limit issue: https://github.com/microsoft/playwright-mcp/issues/889

Claude Skills docs: https://docs.claude.com/en/docs/claude-code/skills

Show context
simonw ◴[20 Oct 25 15:13 UTC] No.45644867[source]▶
I'm using Playwright so much right now. All of the good LLMs appear to know the API really well.

Using Claude Code I'll often prompt something like this:

"Start a python -m http.server on port 8003 and then use Playwright Python to exercise this UI, there's a console error when you click the button, click it and then read that error and then fix it and demonstrate the fix"

This works really well even without adding an extra skill.

I think one of the hardest parts of skill development is figuring out what to put in the skill that produces better results than the model acting alone.

Have you tried iteratively testing the skill - building it up part by part and testing along the way to see if the different sections genuinely help improve the model's performance?

replies(6): >>45645082 #>>45645102 #>>45645168 #>>45645703 #>>45648989 #>>45649038 #
silveraxe93 ◴[20 Oct 25 16:23 UTC] No.45645703[source]▶
I'm surprised Anthropic didn't release skills with a `skill-creation` skill.
replies(1): >>45645914 #
submeta ◴[20 Oct 25 16:40 UTC] No.45645914[source]▶
But they did.
replies(1): >>45646023 #
1. silveraxe93 ◴[20 Oct 25 16:47 UTC] No.45646023[source]▶
Did they!? Damn I missed it.

I was looking into creating one and skimmed the available ones and didn't see it.

EDIT:

Just looked again. In the docs they have this section: ``` Available Skills

Pre-built Agent Skills The following pre-built Agent Skills are available for immediate use:

    PowerPoint (pptx): Create presentations, edit slides, analyze presentation content
    Excel (xlsx): Create spreadsheets, analyze data, generate reports with charts
    Word (docx): Create documents, edit content, format text
    PDF (pdf): Generate formatted PDF documents and reports
These Skills are available on the Claude API and claude.ai. See the quickstart tutorial to start using them in the API. ```

Is there another list of available skills?

replies(1): >>45647007 #
2. simonw ◴[20 Oct 25 17:59 UTC] No.45647007[source]▶
Their repo here: https://github.com/anthropics/skills

This is the skill creation one: https://github.com/anthropics/skills/blob/main/skill-creator...

You can turn on additional skills in the Claude UI from this page: https://claude.ai/settings/capabilities

replies(1): >>45649101 #
3. silveraxe93 ◴[20 Oct 25 20:44 UTC] No.45649101[source]▶
Nice, thanks!