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# Playwright MCP Alternative: Zero Tokens at Runtime

April 18, 2026 · Leon Ting · 6 min read

You launch Claude with Playwright MCP. Three tool calls in, you're at 80,000 tokens. Five calls in, the context window is half full. You scroll the log and realize the model just spent 27,000 tokens reading the DOM of one page — to click a single button.

You are not alone.

> "I got tired of playwright-mcp eating through Claude's 200K token limit. 114,000 tokens through MCP vs 27,000 tokens through CLI — for the same task."

> — syntax-sherlock, Hacker News (189 points, "Playwright Skill" launch)

## Why Playwright MCP Burns Context

Every `page.click(selector)`, `browser_snapshot`, and `locator` call the model issues round-trips a DOM payload, an a11y snapshot, and a status response. The LLM reads all of it. Then it plans the next action. Then it reads another snapshot. The loop compounds.

For a single 10-step workflow you pay for the model to re-ingest the page 10 times, reason over 10 planning prompts, and emit 10 tool calls. The page barely changed. The plan barely changed. You paid anyway.

## Runtime LLM Is the Wrong Layer

Here's a user on r/AI_Agents who figured this out without an MCP spec in front of him:

> "The AI runs the workflow once, learns the pattern, then it executes without the LLM — making it 100x cheaper and way more reliable. My monthly LLM costs went from $200 to $2."

> — u/Omega0Alpha, r/AI_Agents

That's the architecture. AI participates at authoring time. Runtime is deterministic. Taprun ships this as two commands.

## How Taprun Runs at Zero Tokens

    # 1. Forge — AI participates once, writes a program
    $ tap forge "publish a post to X"
    ✔ Saved: x/publish.tap.js  (157 lines)

    # 2. Run — zero AI, zero tokens, deterministic
    $ tap x publish --title "hello" --body "first post"
    ✔ Posted  (1.8s, $0.00, 0 tokens)

The first command uses AI the way MCP expects — DOM snapshot, planning, selector discovery. It does this once and writes a `.tap.js` program to disk. Every subsequent execution runs the program directly. No LLM round-trip. No tokens. No planning loop.

## The MCP Host Still Drives

If you use Claude Code, Cursor, or any MCP host, Taprun plugs in the same as Playwright MCP:

    # .mcp.json
    {
      "mcpServers": {
        "taprun": { "command": "tap", "args": ["mcp"] }
      }
    }

The difference is what happens after the tool call. Playwright MCP hands the model a DOM snapshot and says you figure it out. Taprun hands the model the name of a pre-compiled program and says I already figured it out — here's the result. A `tap.run` call returns rows, not raw HTML. 27k → 0 tokens per execution.

## When to Use Which

| Playwright MCP | Taprun
--- | --- | ---
One-off exploration | ✔ Best fit | `tap forge` works, overkill
Repeated workflow (>3 runs) | Burns tokens each run | ✔ Forge once, $0/run
Long agent sessions | Context fills fast | ✔ Tool calls return rows
Deterministic output | LLM-variable | ✔ Same input → same output
Token cost per step | ~11k–27k | 0

Playwright MCP is a fine prototype tool. For anything you do more than three times, you want a compiled program.

## Caveat: Forge Is Not Free

Forging has a one-time token cost — typically 2–5k tokens depending on site complexity. Break-even against Playwright MCP (at ~27k tokens per invocation) is well under a single run. After that, every execution is $0 and 0 tokens.

## When It Actually Breaks

Sites change. That's the one thing compiled programs can't control. But when they do, `tap doctor` emits a structural diff — exactly which selectors moved, which API endpoints disappeared, what the new DOM looks like. You hand that diff to your agent and it patches the program. You never re-enter the 27k-token-per-step loop to rediscover the same page from scratch.

## Related

- MCP Is the Authoring Layer. Execution Should Cost Zero Tokens.
- Programs Beat Prompts: Why AI Should Write Code, Not Run It
- Deterministic vs AI Browser Automation

### Try it now

    # Install (macOS / Linux)
    curl -fsSL https://taprun.dev/install.sh | sh

    # Connect to Claude Code / Cursor / any MCP host
    tap setup

    # Forge once, run forever at $0
    tap forge "your workflow here"

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