Asking AI to build scrapers should be easy right?

Summary

TL;DR - We just gave Skyvern the ability to write and maintain its own code, making it 2.7x cheaper and 2.3x faster. Give it a prompt (or a series of prompts), and the AI will generate and maintain playwright code while it runs. Try out the via Open Source or Cloud💡 Recap: What is Skyvern? It’s an open source tool that helps companies automate things in the browser with AI. We use computer vision + LLMs to turn prompts into automations that run. We serve both technical and non-technical customers, and have helped them automate things like applying to jobs, fetching invoices or utility bills, filling out government forms, and purchase products from hundreds of different websites.Asking AI to build scrapers should be easy right? Right??Some of you may remember our Hackernews launch from last year. All of the discussion circled around the same idea: “Building the automation is the hard part… we just want Skyvern to write the code”.We agreed. Keeping the agent in the loop means invoking an expensive and non-deterministic LLM call on every run. If Skyvern could compile its reasoning into code and run that instead of keeping an LLM in the loop, automations would become faster, cheaper, and more reliable.So we tried to teach Skyvern to do exactly that… but it turns out, asking AI to write code the same way you and I would wasn’t easy. We ran into two big problems:Requirements for automations are ambiguous at best, and misleading at worst — even humans struggle to define them clearlyThe internet is messy: drop-downs masquerade as textboxes, checkboxes that are always checked, and search bars that are secretly buttons.Getting an agent to navigate that chaos, understand intent, and still produce maintainable code came through one major breakthrough: reasoning models.Reasoning models unlock two important capabilities:They boosted the agent accuracy enough for production useThey let the agent leverage its trajectory to write a script resembling something an engineer would write...