using-lightpandalisted

Operates Lightpanda, a Zig-based headless browser with no rendering pipeline, as an AI agent's browser tool via native MCP or CDP. Covers MCP tool selection (goto, markdown, semantic_tree, interactiveElements, structuredData, click, fill), output mode strategy, the observe-decide-act loop, actions grounded in node IDs, token-efficient page reading, and Chrome fallback triggers. Use when tasks require interactive or stateful web navigation on JS-heavy sites (multi-step flows, form fill/click actions, DOM-aware extraction by node ID), or when the user explicitly asks to use Lightpanda.
msewell/agent-stuff · ★ 0 · Data & Documents · score 70

Install: claude install-skill msewell/agent-stuff

# Using Lightpanda ## What Lightpanda is Lightpanda is a headless browser written in Zig with V8 for JavaScript and html5ever for HTML parsing. It is **not** a Chromium fork. It deliberately omits the entire rendering pipeline (layout, paint, compositing, GPU, font and image decoding). Three modes of operation: - `lightpanda fetch <URL>` — one-shot CLI, dumps HTML or markdown to stdout. - `lightpanda serve` — CDP WebSocket server; target for Puppeteer/Playwright. - `lightpanda mcp` — native MCP stdio server exposing browser actions as tools. Sub-100ms cold start. ~9–11× faster and ~9–16× less memory than headless Chrome on equivalent workloads. Beta maturity — ~95% site compatibility. ## Scope - Interactive, stateful browsing flows where the agent must `goto`, `click`, and `fill` over multiple steps. - JS-dependent pages where static HTTP fetches miss important content. - Targeted extraction from rendered page state using `markdown`, `structuredData`, or a scoped node subtree. ## Non-goals - Open-web source discovery or ranking. - Bulk multi-URL research extraction tasks. - Generic URL-to-markdown conversion when no page interaction is needed. - Non-HTML document conversion (PDF/DOCX/PPTX/audio/image workflows). ## When Lightpanda won't work Stop and use Chrome (or tell the user to) when: - **Screenshots, PDF export, or pixel inspection** are needed — no renderer. - **Bot-protected sites** (Cloudflare managed challenge, DataDome, Akamai, PerimeterX) — Lightp