A point orthogonal to this; consider whether you need browser automation at all.

If a website isn't using Cloudflare or a JS-only design, it's generally better to skip playwright. All the major AIs understand beautifulsoup pretty well, and they're likely to write you a faster, less brittle scraper.

We had a similar realization here at Thoughtful and pivoted towards code generation approaches as well.

I know the authors of Skyvern are around here sometimes -- How do you think about code generation with vision based approaches to agentic browser use like OpenAI's Operator, Claude Computer Use and Magnitude?

From my POV, I think the vision based approaches are superior, but they are less amenable to codegen IMO.

this matches our personal experience, too

In AI First workshops. By now I tell them for the last exercise "no scrappers". the learning is to separate reasoning (AI) from data (that you have to bring.) and ai coded scrappers seem a logical, but always fail. scrapping is a scaling issue, not reasoning challenge. also the most interesting websites are not keen for new scrappers.

Over the past few days I've spent a lot of time dealing with terribly designed UIs. Some legitimate and desired use cases are impossible because poor logic excludes them.

Is AI capable of saying, "This website sucks, and doesn't work - file a complaint with the webmaster?"

I once had similar problems with the CIA's World Factbook. I shudder to think what an I would do there.

The same day, a post on reddit was about: "We built 3B and 8B models that rival GPT-5 at HTML extraction while costing 40-80x less - fully open source" [1].

Not fully equivalent to what is doing Skyvern, but still an interesting approach.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1o8m0ti/we_buil...