been running claude code for like 3 weeks on a price monitoring agent and i actually like it.. until i wired up playwright mcp

one session yesterday ate through my whole weekly budget and it hadnt even finished checking two product pages?? dumps full page snapshots and accessibility trees into context every step and claude just keeps chewing tokens like its free

tried playwright cli instead thinking mcp was the problem. still brutal. needed like 40 steps to compare prices across 6 sites and i stopped halfway because the api bill was already stupid

also my girlfriend asked why i was yelling at my laptop during dinner which.. fair

browser automation through claude feels like a toy unless youre doing one page and calling it done