vibatchium

Agent-piloted browser automation that clears Cloudflare. Patched Playwright + multi-session daemon + credential vault + vision clicking + prompt-injection safety. One MCP server, N parallel Chromes, persistent per-session profiles. Plus two renderer-free lanes on a Chrome TLS fingerprint: vb search to find URLs without a search API, vb fetch to read them — both with per-request --proxy, because engines and walls both rate-limit per IP.

Where this fits. Both Anthropic and Google now ship an agent that drives your own signed-in Chrome — Claude in Chrome and Chrome Auto Browse. If that is what you want, use them: they are free, first-party, and better integrated. They are also supervised — visible window, real time, and they hand control back to you at a login wall or a CAPTCHA. vibatchium is for the other half: unattended, headless, N-at-a-time, on a box with no human in front of it, against sites that fight automation. That is the whole of the wedge, and it is worth being precise about which side of it you are on.

pipx install vibatchium             # core: browse / extract / screenshot / N parallel sessions
# want the stealth HTTP lanes (vb fetch, vb search), the credential vault, VLM read, or the REST shim?
pipx install 'vibatchium[all]'      # everything; or pick extras: vibatchium[fetch], [secrets], [llm], [rest]
patchright install chrome
vb setup                    # register MCP + an auto-discoverable skill so agents reach for vb (idempotent)

Core install covers all browsing. vb fetch and vb search (the curl_cffi TLS-fingerprint lane) are the [fetch] extra; vb install reports which optional lanes are available. On a uv venv (no pip), add an extra with uv pip install --python <venv>/bin/python curl_cffi.

Bleeding edge from master: pipx install 'git+https://github.com/trueoriginlabs/vibatchium#egg=vibatchium[all]'

Coding agents (Codex / Cursor / Claude Code): read AGENTS.md first — it has the one-call recipes (explore, research) and the env-discovery traps to skip.

vb explore https://example.com                      # one-call: text-first (screenshot only as a fallback)
vb research --target https://example.com \          # parallel fan-out, N intents
  --intent "pricing model" --intent "customers" --intent "tech stack"

Status: active development, alpha. 1,195 tests green in CI (Linux, Python 3.11–3.13). Apache-2.0 (AGPL only via the opt-in nodriver extra).

_{Detector scores quoted below (bot.sannysoft, CreepJS, Cloudflare cold-launch) are manual observations, not CI-asserted — no test in the suite gates on them, and they are only as current as the last hand-run. The generated block under Measured scores is the one to trust; it is empty until someone runs it.}

Updating

vb update                  # upgrade + bounce the daemon + refresh the agent skill
vb update --version 0.19.0   # or pin a specific version

vb update detects how vibatchium was installed (pipx, uv tool install, a pip-less uv venv, or pip with a PEP-668 --break-system-packages fallback), stops the running daemon so the next command loads the new code, and rewrites the agent skill / docs blocks so a coding agent is actually told about the verbs the new version ships (--no-restart / --no-setup opt out). Manual equivalent:

pipx upgrade vibatchium    # or: uv tool upgrade vibatchium / pip install -U vibatchium
vb shutdown                # bounce the daemon — it serves old code until you do
vb setup                   # refresh the agent skill + docs
vb --version               # confirm

The daemon-restart step is the one people miss: the long-running daemon keeps serving the old version until it's bounced. vb update does it for you; if you upgrade by hand, run vb shutdown (the next vb call auto-respawns the new version). Optional features upgrade via pipx install 'vibatchium[all]' --force.

Running from a git checkout

git pull updates the source; whether it updates what vb actually runs depends on the install, and two of the three ways it can fail are silent:

vb --version && git describe --tags   # do they agree? if not, the install COPIED
                                      # the source — reinstall editable:
                                      #   uv pip install -e '.[all]'
vb status                             # warns when the daemon predates the source
                                      # ("stale_code") — bounce with `vb shutdown`

A version-string compare cannot catch a checkout: git pull changes the code without changing __version__. vb status compares the daemon's boot time against the newest source file instead, and vb update bounces the daemon only when it is provably behind — so it never drops live sessions for nothing.

New cap buckets need a re-register

The MCP server's --caps list is frozen into your agent's config at first registration, so a bucket added by a later release (0.19.0 added search) stays invisible no matter how many times you upgrade. Re-running vb setup reports the drift but deliberately won't overwrite a --caps you set by hand:

vb setup                              # reports any cap drift, changes nothing
vb setup --force --caps lean,search   # apply it — exposes `vb search` as a tool

Restart the agent session afterwards: the MCP tool list is read once, at start.

Why vibatchium

Persistent logged-in profiles, credential vaults, CDP-attach, N named sessions — agent-browser and playwright-mcp all ship those now, at download volumes we won't match. A comparison table winning rows nobody contests was noise; it's gone.

What's still ours: stealth patches in core (agent-browser's stealth issue has been open since Jan 2026 and the PR attempting it was closed), prompt-injection scanning on by default for page content (nobody else in this lane ships it — though it does not yet cover the fetch/search lanes), TOTP + IMAP 2FA so an unattended run survives a login challenge, and the combination that only matters together — real stock Chrome + CDP stealth + headless + unattended + N persistent logins, on your own machine.

If you don't need the stealth half, use one of the above. They're bigger, older and better tested than we are.

Real Chrome vs fake Chrome

A wave of "headless browser for AI agents" tools rebuild the browser from scratch (Rust + V8, no Blink/Skia) to hit tiny memory and sub-100ms page loads. The catch is structural: with no rendering engine, they can't produce a real device's fingerprint — they synthesize one. And synthetic fingerprints don't hold still.

vibatchium drives real Google Chrome, so its fingerprints are real — and, more to the point, stable. The single test that separates the two is fingerprint stability across navigations. Run the same canvas + WebGL probe on two pages in one session:

_{¹ Chrome's own software renderer (SwiftShader) by default — still a coherent, deterministic Chrome value, not a stub. A hardware-GPU string (e.g. ANGLE (Intel …)) needs the opt-in --gpu flag.}

A real device returns the same fingerprint every page load; a fingerprint keyed off Date.now() does not — and that inconsistency is exactly what lie-detection fingerprinters (CreepJS and friends) flag. Measured: vibatchium's canvas hash and WebGL readback are byte-identical across navigations, and CreepJS reported 0 % stealth-tampering (no synthetic-environment signatures) when last run by hand. That figure is not regression-tested — treat it as an observation, not a guarantee.

This is not a claim of invisibility. The moat is fingerprint authenticity, not hiding that a browser is automated — vibatchium still reads as headless on the headless-specific tells (see Honest limits), and real-GPU WebGL (--gpu) is opt-in. But real, consistent fingerprints pass the consistency tier that synthetic ones fail by construction — and that tier is what stands between you and a login wall.

Multi-session in 10 lines

vb session new work
vb --session work start
vb --session work go https://github.com           # log in by hand once
vb session new banking
vb --session banking start
vb --session banking go https://bank.example.com
vb --session work click @e3 &                     # truly parallel —
vb --session banking fill @e5 hi &                # separate Chromes, no cookie bleed
wait
vb session list

Active-session resolution: --session FLAG → $VIBATCHIUM_SESSION env → ~/.config/vibatchium/active-session → default. Cap via VIBATCHIUM_MAX_SESSIONS=8 (default 8).

Multi-agent: shared sessions vs a private daemon

On one shared daemon, sessions give real fingerprint isolation (separate Chromes, no cookie bleed) but share the host: the session count budget, the memory, and the blast radius of an OOM or a daemon bounce. Two models, pick per trust level:

• Cooperating agents (your own fleet): the shared daemon is right — just give each concurrent agent a unique --session name so stateful flows don't collide on default. vb session lease coordinates a shared name.
• A private blast radius: a per-agent daemon on its own socket + HOME — separate profiles/config/state, its own session budget, zero contact with the shared daemon. vb daemon start --isolated prints the XDG_RUNTIME_DIR/ HOME to export for subsequent calls; vb mcp --isolated runs the MCP server on its own private daemon directly. vb daemon reap cleans up abandoned ones. (Same UID = same trust domain — this bounds blast radius, not a security boundary between distrusting tenants; for that, separate UIDs/containers.)

Resource governance. The session cap bounds process count, not bytes. On a shared box, set VIBATCHIUM_SESSION_RAM_FLOOR_MB to refuse a new launch when free memory is low (a portable admission belt). For a hard ceiling, run the daemon under a cgroup — systemd-run --user --scope -p MemoryMax=4G vb daemon start puts the daemon and all its Chromes in one cgroup sharing the limit: an aggregate daemon-wide cap (not per-renderer), and a breach OOM-kills inside the scope, which can include the daemon. It's the only non-racy memory bound, so size it for the whole fan-out.

Idle CPU. Parked sessions can't burn cores either: the daemon SIGSTOPs a launched session's renderer processes after VIBATCHIUM_IDLE_FREEZE_AFTER seconds with no verb (default 90) and thaws them on the next call, so an idle WebGL / animation page drops to zero CPU without a teardown (default on; VIBATCHIUM_IDLE_FREEZE=0 disables).

Documentation

• AGENTS.md — coding-agent contract (Codex / Cursor / Claude Code)

Server modes

REST capability gating: vb serve --caps=core,nav,input,vision restricts the HTTP surface the same way mcp --caps does. Without it, REST grants local-code-equivalent access (eval + secret_* + file-writing verbs all exposed) — safe for localhost dev, not for hosted/multi-tenant.

Stealth tiers — what clears what

Stealth is a ladder, not a boolean. Pick the lowest tier that clears your target (higher tiers cost more setup / a visible browser / a manual login). vibatchium does not claim cold-launch defeat of behavioral walls — those need a real human-driven session, and attach-mode is the honest answer.

Architecture caveat. Every tier below was measured on x86-64 Linux. Patchright has a known open arm64 / Apple-Silicon detection gap, so these results should not be assumed to carry to an ARM host. If you run there, measure before you rely on it.

Measured scores

vb evals run --update-readme writes measured numbers into the block below, so what we publish is generated rather than asserted. It is empty until someone runs it — an empty block is honest; a number with no run behind it is not.

Run on x86-64 Linux, 25 Aug 2026, Chrome 150, --gpu (real render node). Pass --gpu yourself: headless Chrome falls back to SwiftShader when the GPU path doesn't take, and software GL is itself a detection signal, so numbers measured without it are a floor rather than what a GPU-backed deployment gets.

Read these honestly — two of the three are bad.

• sannysoft 100 is the floor everyone in this category clears; it is not a differentiator.

• creepjs 44 is mediocre. CreepJS is an adversarial lie-detector: it cross-checks main-thread against worker-thread claims and grades confidence, so a middling score means our environment is coherent but not indistinguishable.

• brotector 10 is poor, and we know exactly why. The signal firing is UA_Override / HighEntropyValues.empty, and our own de-Headless fix causes it. Measured on Chrome 150, headless, same profile, with and without the --user-agent flag we set to strip HeadlessChrome:

  	architecture	bitness	uaFullVersion	UA string
  without the flag	x86	64	150.0.7871.114	says HeadlessChrome
  with the flag	empty	empty	empty	says Chrome

  Passing an explicit UA makes Chrome stop deriving high-entropy client hints, so we trade a UA-string tell for a UA-CH-emptiness tell. It is not fixed: the obvious repair (Emulation.setUserAgentOverride with userAgentMetadata) is target-scoped and would reintroduce a main-vs-worker mismatch that is a stronger tell than either leak alone. Publishing this rather than dropping the target is the point — a suite that only reports its wins is marketing.

• nodriver scores identically to patchright on all three. The escalation tier buys nothing measurable on static scoreboards; its case rests on the automation-protocol axis these targets don't probe. An earlier run had nodriver slightly ahead on creepjs (50 vs 44) — but that run silently denied it the GPU while patchright got a real one, so it was scoring from behind. Once both arms get a real renderer the difference disappears.

What these do and don't cover. These are fingerprint scoreboards — the static axis. Through 2026 the major anti-bot vendors moved to session-lifetime behavioural scoring, which none of these targets measure, and which we have not measured against any commercial vendor. Treat a good score here as evidence about environment coherence only.

For the behavioural axis itself, vb oracle run is a self-hosted probe: it drives a page with humanize off then on and grades trajectory curvature, dwell, keystroke cadence and scroll dynamics against a human-plausible band (vb oracle record captures a real-operator baseline; literature defaults until you do). It measures our model of human rather than a named vendor — but it turns "we humanize" into a measured on/off delta, and it's honest about the one axis synthetic input can't reach: CDP input emits no raw-pointer / coalesced events, which only attach-mode against real hardware closes.

Escalation ladder when a wall trips: headless → --headed → humanize on → --backend nodriver → attach-mode after a manual login. Patchright's CDP-layer patches apply in all tiers, including attach (connect_over_cdp).

The fetch verb is an orthogonal fast-path, not a tier: once you're past a wall in the browser, vb fetch reuses that session's cookies+proxy to hit JSON/API endpoints at TLS-fingerprint-correct speed — but it runs no JS, so it can't clear a JS challenge itself.

Search — find the URL, not just read it

Reading a walled page is only half a research loop; the other half is discovery, and search engines are anti-bot walled like everything else. vb search runs the SERP over the same curl_cffi lane — no browser, no session, no API key, and no per-session call budget to run out of mid-run.

vb search "playwright stealth detection" -n 5
vb search "cdp leak" --site github.com -n 20
vb search "postmortem" --urls | xargs -I{} vb fetch --no-cookies {}

Engines are tried as a ladder (ddg → ddg-lite → bing) until one answers, because reachability moves: the endpoint serving results now may rate-limit (HTTP 202) on the next call. --json returns an attempts array naming every engine that declined and why, and a reason separating all engines are walled from the web has nothing — different problems, different fixes, and the CLI exits non-zero only for the first.

It never reuses session cookies (a SERP needs no login, and attaching one deanonymises the request), which is why it gets its own search cap instead of riding on fetch. No date filter is exposed on purpose: DuckDuckGo's mislabels article dates badly enough to corrupt a timeline. Engines rate-limit per IP — see proxies, below.

Proxies — per-request egress on both stealth lanes

Egress is the axis most people get wrong, so it gets stated precisely rather than implied. Both curl_cffi lanes take --proxy scheme://[user:pass@]host:port:

vb fetch --no-cookies https://api.example/v1 --proxy http://user:pass@gw:12323
vb search "site reliability postmortem" -n 20 --proxy http://user:pass@gw:12323
vb --session work proxy set http://user:pass@gw:12323    # or per-session, for the browser

Measured, not asserted — same box, same command, only --proxy differing:

Four things worth knowing:

• Unset means direct, and that is enforced. The daemon hands libcurl an explicit empty proxy, which is the only value that stops it reading HTTP(S)_PROXY / ALL_PROXY out of the environment it was spawned with. A long-lived daemon inherits whatever shell first started it, so without this a stray HTTPS_PROXY would silently reroute every request while the response claimed direct egress. (It did, until 0.19.0 — see the changelog.)
• It matters most for search. Engines rate-limit per IP, so a wide research fan-out from one address is the fastest way to push every query onto the last rung of the engine ladder. The response reports proxied: true|false so you can tell which IP a thin result set came from.
• The proxy address is SSRF-guarded like the target URL, with --allow-internal to opt in to a proxy on your own LAN. An unguarded proxy reaches internal services and returns their response bodies, not just connection errors.
• A bad proxy is an error, never a fallback. Silently egressing from the host IP when you asked for a specific one is worse than failing, because the whole point of asking was that the host IP must not be used. Proxy URLs are redacted from the verb log; responses carry the boolean, never the URL.

With a browser session, vb proxy set also wires the WebRTC leak guard — a tunnelled HTTP request still leaks the real IP via STUN without it.

Attach mode — the practical Cloudflare workaround

For DataDome / Kasada / hardened auth that walls cold-launch automation:

google-chrome --remote-debugging-port=9222 \
              --disable-blink-features=AutomationControlled \
              --user-data-dir=/tmp/cdp-profile &
# log into the walled site by hand
vb attach http://localhost:9222
vb go https://target.example.com        # now reads as your real browser

Patchright's CDP-layer stealth still applies over connect_over_cdp — attach mode gets the same protocol-level patches as cold launch, plus your real-browser fingerprint and any cookies from the manual login.

Launch flags are yours on this tier. On cold launch the backend supplies --disable-blink-features=AutomationControlled for you. Attach connects to a Chrome that is already running, so nothing vibatchium does can add a launch flag after the fact — if you started Chrome without it, that tell is present for the whole session. Include it in the command above.

--remote-debugging-port is an open door. It grants full browser control to any process on the machine, and a page you visit can probe localhost to discover it. Use it on a machine you trust, and close Chrome when you're done.

Security model

vibatchium is built to drive real logins from an untrusted agent loop, so the threat model is "a credential must never reach the model, a screenshot, or a log":

• Encrypted vault. Passwords and TOTP secrets live in an XSalsa20-Poly1305 vault keyed from the OS keyring or VIBATCHIUM_SECRETS_KEY. A resolved secret never appears in logs, HAR captures, the observe cache, or any agent-visible response field (grep-tested in CI).
• Secrets are never rendered in the clear. fill --use-secret masks the field in the page (-webkit-text-security), applied before the value is written, so every path that turns the viewport into bytes — the screenshot verb, the 5 fps live-view stream, and VLM vision_* calls that ship the frame to a model — captures dots, not the value. The mask fails closed (no write if it can't be confirmed), covers password fields so a show-password toggle can't unmask, and the accessibility snapshot returned by map / diff_map strips masked values so the secret can't leak into the model's context as text either.
• Live-view is authenticated. The WebSocket requires a per-server token and rejects foreign-Origin connections (the CSWSH class), and driving the page is a separate token from watch-only — a read-only link can be shared without handing over the keyboard. Binds 127.0.0.1 by default (--insecure-public to override).
• Scraped content is marked untrusted. MCP verbs that return page-derived text carry openWorldHint, so a host can taint the output against prompt injection instead of treating a scraped page as instructions; pure probes are readOnlyHint and mutating verbs (stop, secret_delete, storage_restore) are destructiveHint.
• REST shim. Without --caps, the bearer token grants every verb including eval, secret_*, and file-writing verbs — local-code-equivalent, so always pass --caps=... in hosted mode. All vibatchium-written files are 0600; directories 0700.

Honest limits

• 5+ concurrent sessions = 1-2GB RAM. Each persistent-context Chrome is ~200-400MB. Bump cap with VIBATCHIUM_MAX_SESSIONS=8.

• Vision spend cap is process-wide. N fan-out agents share one daily/lifetime budget.

• Init scripts don't work on patchright backend. chrome.runtime stays undefined — accepted trade for stealth wins.

• Login walls (X, LinkedIn) require attach mode. Cold-launch fan-out can't defeat sites requiring authenticated sessions.

• Synthetic input has a CDP coordinate signature. Every click/type/hover/scroll rides Playwright over CDP Input.dispatchMouseEvent/dispatchKeyEvent (pageX==screenX, no CoalescedEvents). Patchright patches the JS-context leaks, not the Input domain, and humanize on improves trajectory/timing realism but does not change the per-event signature. Behavioral walls that fingerprint it (DataDome/Kasada/HUMAN) want attach-mode against a real headful Chrome you drive — OS-level synthetic input (CDP-Patches) is headful + active-tab only and doesn't fit a headless, N-parallel daemon.

• fetch is a static-fingerprint lane, not a browser. The curl_cffi fetch verb matches Chrome's JA3/HTTP2 but runs no JavaScript — it clears TLS-fingerprint gates, not DataDome/Kasada/Turnstile JS challenges. Fall back to go for those.

• Single daemon = single point of failure. No HA built in.

• Behavioural detection now targets the humanizer directly. Cloudflare's 2026 bot-detection work names mathematically ideal Bézier cursor paths and superhuman click precision as tells. humanize improves on nothing-at-all, but it is a pointer-trajectory model, not a physiological one — and it is off by default, which on a behaviourally-scored site is the louder of the two states.

• One burned profile can taint every account that shares it. Vendors now link device telemetry across sessions and accounts. Use one profile per account, never share a profile between identities, and don't reuse a profile that has already been challenged.

• The fetch and search lanes are outside prompt-injection scanning. The scanner covers page-content verbs (text, html, extract, map, …). SERP titles and fetched bodies are third-party text going straight into an agent's context and are not scanned today. Treat them as untrusted input.

Authorized use

vibatchium is built to drive sessions you own, with your credentials, on your machine — your accounts, your employer's, or a client's with their written permission. It is a tool for automating access you already have.

That boundary is not a formality, though the law around it moved in 2026. A US district court had granted a preliminary injunction against an AI agent that accessed password-protected pages through the user's own logged-in account, holding that the user's permission is not the platform's authorization. On 4 August 2026 the Ninth Circuit vacated that injunction and remanded (Amazon.com Services, LLC v. Perplexity AI, Inc., No. 26-1444, published), concluding that the operator had not "accessed" the plaintiff's computers under the CFAA at all — "it was the user who accessed [them], with the help of [the] AI agent." The California CDAFA claim failed for the same reason.

Read that narrowly. It decides who accessed a computer, not whether evading a technical block is access "without authorization"; the panel never reached circumvention. A vacated preliminary injunction on remand is not a merits ruling, and it leaves contract, terms-of-service, trespass and copyright theories entirely untouched. What it does support is the shape of the tool: the browser runs on your machine, under your login, and the reasoning leaned on exactly that — no operator computer ever touched the other side's servers.

Scraping a site's public pages, evading a wall you have no account behind, or automating an account whose terms forbid it remain decisions you are making, and the consequences are yours.

Check the terms of the site you are automating. If you are acting for someone else, get it in writing.

License

Apache-2.0 core. Every default-install extra is permissive too — the fetch lane's curl_cffi is MIT. The only copyleft option is the opt-in nodriver backend (AGPL-3.0) — consult licensing before integrating it commercially. Nothing GPL/AGPL ships in the base install or [all].