The Claude extension for Chrome stopped being a pilot on Wednesday and landed on every paid plan. What matters more to us is different: Claude Code drives that browser from your terminal, so you no longer have to move over to claude.ai to have AI click through a page for you.
Inside Claude Code, what changed along the way is how much of its work you get to see. Auto mode now lays out the rules it goes by, and a bug report is something the AI assistant will write into a queue for you, instead of leaving you in front of an empty form.
Claude Code steps into your browser
Anthropic dated the end of the pilot to Wednesday 26 August, and from that day the extension works on every paid plan. The announcement isn’t the interesting part here, though – Claude Code can drive that same browser. You start it with the --chrome flag, in the VS Code editor you don’t even need that, and the AI assistant opens tabs in your own Chrome.
Take a job you may have been doing by hand: copying the contacts from a spreadsheet into a web panel. You ask Claude Code for it, and it reads the file on your disk, opens a tab in Chrome and fills the form in row by row. It clicks in front of you, in an ordinary browser window, and works on the accounts you already have a session open on – it needs no passwords for that. At a login screen, and at a “confirm you are human” test, it stops and waits for you.
Two limits come with the extension. Anthropic advises against letting it near financial accounts, legal documents, health data and pages holding other people’s data – a page can carry an instruction woven into its text so that Claude takes it for yours, and Anthropic’s filters shrink that risk rather than remove it. The second limit is a plain one: the connection does not work in WSL, the Linux installed inside Windows.
Auto mode shows the rules it goes by
Since version 2.1.246 of Claude Code, released on Tuesday 25 August, you can read the rules of auto mode inside the tool itself: you type /permissions and move to the Auto mode tab. The tab groups the rules by how hard they block. Some things auto mode will never do, and asking outright changes nothing there. Others it holds back until you name that one action – a general “sort this out for me” won’t do. For those second rules, the tab lists the exceptions separately.
Your own rule goes in the same place, as an ordinary sentence: auto mode reads it the way you wrote it and doesn’t look for a pattern to match. You can also state the boundary in conversation and auto mode will respect it, without writing it down anywhere, though it can drop out once Claude Code summarises the conversation along the way. A sentence written into the tab lands in your user settings, so it holds in every session after that and in every folder. The built-in rules stay in force alongside it, until you switch them off.
The built-in entries about trusted surroundings mostly describe a developer’s world: repositories, cloud storage, servers that code gets shipped to. Even if you never write a line of code, the tab has something for you: set Claude Code going, and before you walk away from the computer you can open it and see in black and white what the AI assistant will not touch on its own.
Claude Code writes the bug report now
Since version 2.1.247, when something in Claude Code goes wrong in the middle of a session, the AI assistant can write the report itself and set it aside in a queue. You then type /feedback with nothing after it and get a list of those drafts. Each one can be read, edited, sent or thrown away.
Nothing leaves that queue without you: the drafts sit on your own disk, and on the screen before sending you decide whether the report goes off with a record of the conversation attached, or on its own.
The queue pays off most when something fell over in the middle of other work and an hour later you can no longer reconstruct what exactly went wrong – the report gets written by the one who watched the whole thing from the inside. One thing stays yours, though: read the draft before it goes, because the record of the conversation travels with it by default.