Foundations
Foundations
Quality Degradation Curves
Your hotel pricing extraction ran at 98% success for six months. Then it didn't. Quality rarely breaks all at once—it erodes. Operating web agents across thousands of sites, you start seeing patterns in how that erosion happens. Some automations cliff overnight when sites change. Others drift downward so gradually you don't notice until you're deep in the hole. The shape of degradation reveals infrastructure capability better than any demo. Understanding these curves matters before you're locked into an approach.
Quality Degradation Curves
Your hotel pricing extraction ran at 98% success for six months. Then it didn't. Quality rarely breaks all at once—it erodes. Operating web agents across thousands of sites, you start seeing patterns in how that erosion happens. Some automations cliff overnight when sites change. Others drift downward so gradually you don't notice until you're deep in the hole. The shape of degradation reveals infrastructure capability better than any demo. Understanding these curves matters before you're locked into an approach.
Tools & Techniques
When Developers Need to See What's Actually There—The Cookies.txt Browser Extension
Three hours into debugging, you discover the session expired mid-workflow. Figuring that out meant adding logging, rerunning scripts, parsing DevTools. What you needed was simpler: just look at the cookies. Development teams install the Cookies.txt browser extension for this moment. Click the icon, export, open the file. Authentication tokens, expiration timestamps, domain coverage—all visible. No parsing, no code. When iteration speed matters more than automation, seeing what's actually there beats scripting it.
When Teams Need Sessions That Survive Restarts—Selenium's Cookie API
Test suites that authenticate fresh for every run waste minutes multiplied across hundreds of cases. Automation workflows that break when tokens expire mid-execution lose reliability at scale. Production web agents can't rely on manual cookie extraction—sessions must persist across thousands of runs without human intervention. Teams building at this scale implement Selenium's Cookie API, where code saves authentication state to files and reloads it automatically. When workflows run in CI/CD pipelines, programmatic session management stops being optional.
Pattern Recognition
We're watching companies hit the same wall. Agents start complex tasks, run out of context halfway through, leave work half-finished. Anthropic documented this clearly: even frontier models exhaust their context windows mid-project, forcing the next session to reconstruct what happened.
Here's what matters. Companies are designing agents to work like human developers—continuous sessions, maintained context, marathon coding sprints. Agents need different architecture. They operate in discrete sessions with no memory of what came before.
Look at what's actually working: multi-agent systems, the 89% observability adoption rate. Both point to the same lesson. Agents need explicit session boundaries, clear state management, specialized roles. Not attempts to replicate human work patterns.
