Your assistant works in a real Chrome on a real machine. That machine can be your laptop, a box in the server room or a small VM on the other side of the world — and the sites it can reach are the sites that machine can reach.
The extension runs in a Chrome that is already inside
your home or office network, so your assistant reaches whatever that Chrome can: the NAS
admin page, the router, an internal wiki, a dev server on localhost:3000.
Nothing is exposed and no tunnel is opened — Chrome reaches out to TabTunnel, and
nothing on the internet reaches in.
“Open the NAS admin page and tell me how much space is left on the media share.”
It opens nas.local in your own Chrome, already signed in, reads the figure off the page and tells you.
Set up a handful of test machines with one-time codes instead of signing a personal account into a shared computer. They belong to the team, hold nobody’s logins, and only the people you name may use them. A nightly job or an assistant then drives each one by name — a real Chrome with real rendering, real extensions and a real screen, not a headless approximation of one.
“Run the checkout flow on test-02 against staging and screenshot every step.”
It works through the flow on that machine and hands the screenshots back, and the record says which machine, which page, and who asked.
Fetch a modern web app with curl and you
get an empty <div id="app"> and a script tag. The content arrives only
when the JavaScript runs, after a login, behind a click. A real tab has already done all of
that, so your assistant reads the finished page — as markdown or as the accessibility
tree — and clicks on from there.
“Go through the orders dashboard and list everything still marked unpaid.”
It reads the table the page drew, pages through it and lists every order it finds. No API, no export, no scraper to maintain.
Run Chrome and TabTunnel on a small VM in each place that matters and every one of them shows up in your dashboard by name. Nothing is picked for you — your assistant asks which one and works in that one. Fares as they are shown in Tokyo, your own site’s German checkout, availability as a customer in Lisbon sees it.
“Check the London to Tokyo fares on the Tokyo browser and compare them with the London one.”
It looks the route up in each browser and puts the two answers side by side.
If your situation is not one of these four, the answer is probably still the same: a real browser, on a real machine, that you already own.