Dev burns 2 days on basic email automation with Google Astra, blocked by CAPTCHAs and logins
AjdDavison · x · 2026-09-10
- Developer Mark Cummins spent 2 days trying to get Google's Astra to do extremely basic email automation; CAPTCHAs and login walls blocked it from doing half of what he wanted.
- His take: AI will explode in low-friction directions (like mathematics), but most of the economy is high-friction for LLMs — a crisp articulation of the real agent bottleneck: not model capability but web friction.
More from coding & agent
- Stanford's PaperFormalizer turns research papers into Lean-verified versions with author in the loop — StanfordUniversity · 2026-10-27
- Hugging Face TRL makes score centering + masked importance sampling default in async GRPO — _lewtun · 2026-10-27
- AutoResearch agent's weird training curve gets dug into instead of discarded — ZimingLiu11 · 2026-10-27
- Firecrawl offers 2.5x credits to a16z Speedrun founders, unveils $75M Series B — devdigest · 2026-10-27
- Chums: open-source Apple Watch app puts Claude Code and Codex on your wrist — brandon_galang · 2026-10-27
- Open-source Clairic Studio turns pasted text into typed data and working code in 5 languages — dfinke · 2026-10-27