Zot Chrome Operator: Let Your Terminal AI Agent Drive the Browser via Side Panel

Zot Chrome Operator bridges your terminal-based coding agent zot with Chrome, letting zot operate browser tabs via a browser_action tool. The project by Patrice Eckhart provides a Chrome side panel for chatting with zot and a local WebSocket bridge that executes browser actions.

Installation

No changes to zot itself required. Run:

zot ext install https://github.com/patriceckhart/zot-chrome-operator
node "$HOME/Library/Application Support/zot/extensions/zot-chrome-operator/bin/install-cli.js"

The second command creates a zot-chrome shim at ~/.local/bin/zot-chrome. Ensure that directory is on your PATH (add export PATH="$HOME/.local/bin:$PATH" to your shell profile if needed). The shim is auto-refreshed on next zot start, but running install-cli.js makes it available immediately.

Setup Steps

• Build the Chrome extension: zot-chrome ext prints the path to the unpacked build (e.g., /Users/you/Library/Application Support/zot/extensions/zot-chrome-operator/dist). Load it in Chrome via chrome://extensions with Developer mode enabled → Load unpacked.
• Start the bridge: zot-chrome start builds the extension if needed and starts the bridge in the background. The bridge runs zot rpc --no-session and listens on ws://localhost:9224.
• Environment variables: ZOT_PROVIDER=anthropic ZOT_MODEL=claude-sonnet-4-5 zot-chrome start or PORT=9225 zot-chrome start to customize.

Commands

• zot-chrome start – Start the bridge server in background
• zot-chrome stop – Stop the bridge
• zot-chrome status – Check bridge state
• zot-chrome logs – Tail bridge logs
• zot-chrome ext – Print or build the unpacked extension path

Browser Capabilities

The registered zot tool can: list, create, switch, and close tabs; inspect page context; navigate; click; type into native and rich editors; select options; scroll; extract page text; and wait. No session is persisted — the bridge uses zot --no-session.

The bridge logs all actions, viewable with zot-chrome logs.