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Recipe idea: Web browsing with Plasmate instead of Chrome #464

@dbhurley

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@dbhurley

Most web browsing recipes in the cookbooks use Playwright/Chrome to fetch page content before sending it to Claude. This works but sends 50K+ tokens of HTML noise per page.

Plasmate is an open-source browser engine that outputs semantic content, compressing pages by 10-16x. It also ships as an MCP server.

A cookbook recipe could show:

  1. Install Plasmate: pip install plasmate
  2. Fetch a page: plasmate fetch <url> -> clean JSON
  3. Send the SOM to Claude (16x fewer tokens, 94% cost savings)
  4. Compare the same task with raw HTML vs SOM

We have Jupyter notebooks ready if useful: https://github.com/plasmate-labs/notebooks

Happy to contribute the recipe if there's interest. Apache 2.0.

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