headless-fallback

headless-fallback is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from xberg-io/crawlberg. It costs 57 tokens per session (1,128 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A browser fallback for Crawlberg that opens pages in headless Chrome, a browser running without a visible window, when a normal web request cannot retrieve useful content.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it for single-page apps, infinite scrolling, JavaScript-rendered articles, and pages blocked by services such as Cloudflare.
Why use it?
Some sites show content only through JavaScript or block simple requests with security checks; a real browser can load those pages.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Part of the crawlberg plugin — 7 skills, 1 MCP server shipped together

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/xberg-io/crawlberg/headless-fallback
Any agent
npx skills add xberg-io/crawlberg --skill headless-fallback
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/xberg-io/crawlberg

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Or install crawlberg, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 7 skills, 1 MCP server.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for headless-fallback

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/xberg-io/crawlberg/headless-fallback.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/xberg-io/crawlberg/headless-fallback)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/xberg-io/crawlberg/headless-fallback"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/xberg-io/crawlberg/headless-fallback.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 57 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,128 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5 $0.00057 $0.01128
Opus 5 $0.00028 $0.00564
Sonnet 5 $0.00011 $0.00226
Haiku 4.5 $0.00006 $0.00113

Measured 5d ago against content hash af665e644ead, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

headless-fallback scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 5d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

plugin/.ai-rulez/skills/headless-fallback/SKILL.md · 143 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 143 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Headless fallback

Some pages are unscrapable without a real browser — SPA shells, infinite scroll, Cloudflare interstitials, JS-rendered article bodies. Crawlberg ships with an optional headless-Chrome backend driven by chromiumoxide.

Modes

--browser-mode auto    # default — try static first, fall back to browser on JS/WAF
--browser-mode always  # skip static, go straight to browser
--browser-mode never   # static only, fail closed

auto (default)

The engine fetches statically, then inspects the response. It launches headless Chrome and re-fetches when it sees:

  • WAF responses from one of 8 detected vendor fingerprints (Cloudflare, Akamai, AWS WAF, Imperva, DataDome, PerimeterX, F5, plus a generic catch-all).
  • SPA shells: <noscript> warnings, near-empty <body> with heavy JS.
  • Heuristic JS-render-required signals.

This is the right default. The browser only spins up when needed.

always

Skip the static probe entirely. Use when:

  • The user already told you the page needs JS.
  • You are scraping a site you know is React/Vue/Svelte SPA.
  • You need <script>-emitted state that never lands in static HTML.
crawlberg scrape https://spa.example.com --browser-mode always --format markdown

never

Static only — the browser path is disabled. Use when:

  • You are in a hot loop where a stray Chrome launch would blow the budget.
  • You are running in a sandbox without a Chrome binary.
  • The user explicitly wants only static fetches.

In never mode, JS-only pages return empty/stub content. Inspect markdown.content and markdown.warnings before treating the result as final.

Symptoms that point to headless

In --browser-mode never or when you suspect the auto detector missed a signal:

  • markdown.content is short, nav-only, or just a loading message.
  • status_code is 200 but metadata.headings is empty on a page that clearly has headings.
  • markdown.warnings mentions JS-render-required or WAF detection.
  • 403/406/503 with WAF response headers (server: cloudflare, cf-mitigated, x-amz-cf-id, set-cookie: __cf_bm=…).

Read the full file on GitHub · 143 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 5d ago First seen · 143 lines · 57 tokens per session scan A af665e644ead

Subscribe to this mod's changes

headless-fallback is a skill published in the GitHub repository xberg-io/crawlberg (168 stars, last pushed 2d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 57 tokens to every session and 1,128 once invoked, about $0.0003 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.

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