Most of my script failures were navigation-layer breakages, not logic bugs

Opening-Profile6279 · reddit · 2026-07-28

The poster says most failures in the past year were not logic bugs, but navigation-layer breakage: page classes moved, divs got renamed, selectors matched nothing, and scripts quietly returned empty results. The more stable approach was to skip the UI and call the same endpoint the frontend used.

They've been trying webcmd, an early Apache-2.0 project that chooses a strategy per site instead of defaulting to a browser: public endpoint first, then session cookies, then replaying intercepted requests, and only clicking when necessary. The unresolved problem is detecting scripts that return wrong data rather than empty data; schema checks catch shape changes, but not bad values. They ask whether anyone has a better way than weekly eyeballing.

Original post →

More from coding & agent

coding & agent channel →