Chrome's best advertisement so far

Recently I had to pick up a critical performance issue reported by one of the clients. I was juggling one of my ongoing tasks which needed equal attention to meet my timeline (dignity issue, ah 😄)

Though, I was hitting the AI_LAZY syndrome to debug this and decided to open a new Claude session and start thinking about where I should start. One thing we knew, there was some case with huge data which made some components in the frontend create this "Window screen saver" effect. So I went with that scenario and started tinkering with Claude. Unfortunately, and like I anticipated, the changes Claude did didn't work.

The number of performance changes it suggested was overwhelming and tiring when we think about the testing time it required to verify that this computer head did the right thing.

My lazy brain had a plan

So, I went to Chrome and opened the developer tools to analyze the app performance, where I saw the Chrome DevTools MCP ad. So my lazy little brain pushed me to try this. Did the usual MCP adding chore and asked Claude to use this MCP to analyze the performance issue (you have to paste the URL of the page, I haven't plugged Claude into my mind yet 😄).

Chrome profiling with a test environment opened and halted the MCP call, prompting me to click Continue once I was done with the action which caused the lag. Took some minutes, analyzed the code, and gave me a plan.

Here goes nothing

I proceeded to apply changes and started testing the full flow again using the MCP and completed the task by saying we improved the performance metrics from this to that. Blah blah blah.

But when I tested the cases manually.

Voila! It worked like butter. No lag, no freezing, nothing. Still, I hadn't believed it yet. You know.

The verification loop

So I started experimenting again. Used Chrome MCP again to test different actions and ran my test suites using Claude also. I dev tested completely to ensure that Claude didn't cause any war in my code.

Guess what, it was completely functioning and I didn't get any noticeable performance drop.

THE END.