Sending "go back" out to an agent costs several seconds to arrive at something the extension could have done immediately. So every instruction is scored against a local grammar first. Confident single-step commands run in the browser in milliseconds and stop there. Everything else goes to the agent with your text untouched.
Locally-handled commands carry a ⚡ on the timeline.
What runs locally
| Runs locally | Goes to the agent |
|---|---|
| back, forward, reload | "is there a login button?" |
| open github.com, open localhost:3000 | "open the settings menu" |
| open github.com in a new tab | "close this tab", "switch to my gmail tab" |
| google something, search the web for something | "search for wireless headphones" |
| scroll up, down, top, bottom, page down | "scroll down and tell me what it says" |
| press enter, hit escape, press arrow down | "click sign in and then fill in my email" |
| click Sign in, tap Continue | "click Buy now", "click it" |
| record my browsing session, stop recording | "record a video of this page" |
| stop monitoring | "stop watching and tell me what happened" |
Common site names are known, so "open gmail", "open hacker news" and "open stack overflow" resolve without you typing a URL.
Why the split falls where it does
The bias is toward escalating, because the two mistakes are not symmetric:
- Escalating something it could have handled costs a round trip.
- Acting on something it misread spends a wrong click on your real page.
So five categories escalate unconditionally, regardless of how confident the match looks:
| Questions | "is there a login button?" |
| Multi-step phrasing | "and then", "after that" |
| Hedges | "if", "unless", "try to" |
Anything starting with @ |
An explicit skill pin |
| Consequential-sounding targets | buy, pay, delete, send, submit, confirm and friends |
A local command that runs and fails also escalates, rather than reporting the failure.
Two things this explains
Local commands leave no trace in browsentic-mcp logs. They never reach the daemon. That is
expected, not a bug — the ⚡ is where they show up.
Explaining any single routing decision:
yarn check:intent "take me to the checkout page"That prints how the grammar scored it and where it would go.
See also
- Conversations — the timeline these appear on
- Skills — what happens to everything that escalates
- internals/agent-runs.md § The intent funnel — the scoring