people will burn $300 in tokens vibecoding a worse version of a tool another company spent years perfecting sometimes speed matters more than owning the stack if it already works, use it and move

you met me at a very Chinese time in my life

anyone who's turbo autistic and riddled with ADHD has to actively resist starting a new company every time something interesting catches their attention AI can now clone a competitor's frontend and core backend in a day dangerous amount of freedom to give us LOL

if you're using claude to build web scrapers, feed it this context before letting it write another 800 lines of Playwright some interesting rabbit holes worth going down: HAR diffing capture two network sessions, change ONE variable between them and have claude compare the request bodies, parameters, response structures and dependency order. repeat across searches, filters, pagination etc. you can start piecing together the underlying query model without having to automate every interaction through the browser. AST analysis rather than manually digging through 40,000 lines of compiled javascript, have claude parse the relevant bundles into an abstract syntax tree using Babel or Acorn. trace request constructors, shared API clients, pagination handlers and response transformations. have claude correlate what it finds against your HAR captures. source maps check for exposed `.js.map` files containing `sourcesContent`. depending on the build configuration, these can reconstruct portions of the original readable frontend source. feed claude the recovered modules alongside your network captures and have it map the API clients, field transformations and application state. minification ≠ encryption. hydration payloads inspect the initial HTML for `__NEXT_DATA__`, Nuxt payloads and React Server Component flight data. some frameworks serialize application state into the initial document, meaning the records you're looking for might already be present before client-side hydration even begins. have claude compare these against subsequent network responses. schema inference capture 20–30 DIFFERENT JSON responses. different searches, record types, filters, etc. have claude generate a union schema, identify optional fields, nested attributes, inconsistent types and null behaviour. last thing you want is an extractor that works beautifully on your first 100 records and silently drops useful attributes across the next million. response transformations compare raw server responses against the actual records displayed in the UI. frontend code can merge objects, rename attributes, calculate additional values or discard fields entirely before rendering. have claude reconstruct those transformations and map the original response fields. occasionally the interface is showing you substantially less information than the server actually returned. incremental acquisition look into ETags, Last-Modified, update timestamps, stable identifiers and content hashing. where supported, these can help identify which records actually changed instead of collecting and processing the same dataset every single run. especially interesting once you're dealing with millions of records and recurring refreshes. data reconciliation take samples from multiple sources and have claude construct a canonical schema. normalize company domains and identifiers, compare timestamps, preserve field-level provenance and assign confidence scores where information conflicts. also please stop deduplicating companies by name alone. you are going to merge 14 unrelated businesses called Apex Solutions into one entity. extraction observability have claude build checks for schema drift, unusual null rates, unexpected pagination behaviour, duplicate inflation and sudden changes in record counts. a scraper crashing is whatever. a scraper running successfully for 3 weeks while quietly producing incomplete datasets is a much more expensive problem. also worth having it generate a small validation report after every acquisition rather than trusting a successful exit code. there's a LOT more to scraping than making a browser click buttons. understand the data pipeline before you automate it.

>new lead db saas drops free plan >advertises nearly a BILLION contacts >gives me 50 trial credits >how generous mr businessman :3 >open devtools >find funny little select_all endpoint >returns 10k lead IDs in ONE request >second endpoint resolves IDs into full JSON profiles in batches of 1k >neither touches export credits >lol >lmao even >pick one obscure sub-industry to test with >165k results >API caps individual queries at 10k >wait >cap is per search not per account >oh dear :3 >title × sub-industry × state × founded year >many such combinations >write autistic little python loop >18 req/min so their raspberry pi doesn't achieve nuclear fusion >collect IDs, resolve JSON, merge, dedupe >notice 90k matches have historical job titles >apparently half of america is still CEO of a company they left in 2019 >regex current_title >deport impostors >1 hour later >153,723 decision makers >full names, titles, domains, linkedin URLs, HQ addresses, headcount, industry etc >literally everything except email >oh nooooo :( >feed names + domains into external email guesser >SMTP validation >we'll handle enrichment ourselves sir :3 >check pricing again >100k credits costs well over a grand >0 export credits consumed >remember this was ONE obscure sub-industry >realize the same query partitioning logic theoretically applies to their ENTIRE search index >nearly a billion contacts advertised >stare at database >database stares back >the industrial fishing implications are becoming difficult to ignore >somewhere a founder is A/B testing his upgrade button >brother your entire monetization layer is display ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I think people massively underestimate how good it is for your brain to just fuck off to a completely unfamiliar place every once in a while went down a rabbit hole on this recently and found something pretty interesting there's research around novelty-induced memory boosts showing that exploring an unfamiliar environment can actually improve your ability to remember information you encounter AFTER the experience, even when it's completely unrelated think about what that means for a second spend 6 months in the same apartment, seeing the same people, taking the same routes and eventually your brain gets so good at predicting your surroundings that most of your day requires very little conscious effort now drop yourself in a foreign country for a month you barely speak the language, don't know where anything is and even getting groceries becomes something you have to actively figure out lol all this novelty engages the hippocampus and the brain's learning/memory systems there's also research suggesting routine periods are literally remembered as SHORTER than periods filled with unfamiliar experiences which is pretty wild when you consider how quickly entire months can disappear when every day looks the same I think there's a tremendous amount of value in periodically disrupting your entire existence and forcing yourself to navigate something unfamiliar your brain wasn't designed to live the same Tuesday 365 days a year

hired an indian off fiverr and gave him a codex subscription every few hours i message him "JARVISH status report" and send another 100k row csv silicon valley calls this agentic orchestration

oh great, now video scam calls will be even more effective 🤦‍♂️ - cold DM from an aged account with a pfp matching the AI avatar used on the call - have the AI agent pitch the target on a fake business opportunity - direct them to a malicious GitHub repo disguised as a legitimate project and convince them to run it locally - embedded malware executes, potentially deploying an infostealer/RAT to exfiltrate credentials, session tokens, crypto wallet data, and gain remote access to the victim's machine sharing this so people are aware scams like this have already been happening, and giving scammers access to photorealistic AI agents that can autonomously hold entire video conversations is only going to make it worse there needs to be some kind of abuse prevention system in place, but Tavus won't care. they'll make bank