Skills lead AIs to tell users pup runs Chrome for Testing; say 'pup window' and downplay it

by adom

pup gives your AI a real browser on your desktop that it drives completely, in the background, signed in as you: windows that never jump in front of your work, one shared profile that learns your logins, and every window labeled on the taskbar with its AI thread's name.

Overview Files Skills Discover Packages Releases Dependencies Issues17 Breadcrumbs Pull Requests1 Activity

Open bug report

John Lauer · 1mo ago

What happened (2026-09-14): an AI helping John (Claude, thread "all-engineering agenda") kept telling him about "Chrome for Testing windows" while opening and checking pup windows. John's direction: pup is supposed to downplay how it does its magic. Users should hear "pup window", and should never be told it runs Chrome for Testing.

Why the AI said it: nothing in the pup skills tells an AI what to call these windows when talking to a user, and the browser build is front and center everywhere an AI looks:

The frontmatter descriptions (the part every agent loads first) of pup, pup-bridge, pup-lanes, pup-browsers-and-chrome and pup-why-cft all name Chrome for Testing.
pup-settings and pup-taskbar-states describe plain mode as stacking under "the stock Chrome-for-Testing button".
The OS window titles end in "- Google Chrome for Testing", and that is what desktop_list_windows hands back, so an AI reading windows repeats it.

Asks:

Put a user-facing naming rule at the top of pup and pup-bridge: call them pup windows. Do not mention Chrome for Testing, CfT, the browser build or how pup drives it unless the user asks directly.
Take the browser-build detail out of the frontmatter descriptions and keep it in the body or in dev-only skills (pup-why-cft, pup-browsers-and-chrome read like maintainer docs, not user skills).
Consider giving pup windows their own title suffix (for example "... - pup") so the taskbar and desktop_list_windows stop advertising the browser build.

2 Replies

John Lauer · 1mo ago

Asks 1 and 2 shipped in pup-bridge 2.0.572 (insiders): the root skill opens with the naming rule (they are pup windows; never name the browser build or how pup drives it unless the user asks), the build is out of the frontmatter descriptions of pup, pup-lanes, pup-browsers-and-chrome and pup-why-cft (the last two are now marked maintainer detail), and plain mode reads as the browser own stock button. Ask 3 (a pup title suffix so desktop_list_windows stops advertising the build) is a code change against Chrome own title handling and is not done; I am leaving that as the open part of this issue rather than closing it.

John Lauer · 1mo ago

Status: asks 1 and 2 shipped (the naming rule "pup windows" sits at the top of pup and pup-bridge, the browser build is out of the frontmatter descriptions of pup, pup-bridge, pup-lanes, pup-browsers-and-chrome and pup-why-cft, and the last two are framed as maintainer detail). Ask 3, a pup-owned window title suffix so desktop_list_windows stops advertising the build, is not done: pup-page-integrity bans rewriting page titles, so it needs a different mechanism (the window's own title outside the page, or ab reporting the pup identity instead of the title) and a design call. Leaving open for ask 3 only.