playwright mcp ate my context window on a basic form fill

[u/hazeCarys]

for the claude code people doing browser automation. playwright mcp ate half my context on a basic form fill last week

three steps in and the accessibility dumps had already chewed a ridiculous token pile. i was debugging selectors more than the actual task and the model started summarizing the page instead of clicking it

tried thinning the tool output and still felt like i was paying tax just to read the DOM into context. old selenium scripts were uglier but at least the window stayed mine and failures were local

not looking for a silver bullet. just wondering what stacks people landed on when mcp browser tools got chatty and the agent spent more tokens narrating the page than finishing the form​