Practitioner's Corner
Lessons from the field—what we see building at scale
Practitioner's Corner
Lessons from the field—what we see building at scale
What Got Normalized Away
The competitor tracking dashboard showed stable availability for three months, then a 12% price jump overnight. The data quality engineer pulled last quarter's manual collection logs to compare. Same product, same retailer, two weeks before the spike: "Limited stock—2-3 units available." This quarter's agent-collected entry for the same listing: "In stock." Three months of records told the same story. Something in the automation was smoothing away signals that preceded price changes. The data had gotten cleaner.
What Got Normalized Away
The competitor tracking dashboard showed stable availability for three months, then a 12% price jump overnight. The data quality engineer pulled last quarter's manual collection logs to compare. Same product, same retailer, two weeks before the spike: "Limited stock—2-3 units available." This quarter's agent-collected entry for the same listing: "In stock." Three months of records told the same story. Something in the automation was smoothing away signals that preceded price changes. The data had gotten cleaner.
What You Lose When You Remove the Screenshots
A login button moves from top-right to bottom-left during a site redesign. The HTML is identical—same element, same attributes—but your agent can't find it anymore. The spatial cues that signaled "this matters" or "wait here" vanish with the visual information when you strip the page down to text.
Satya Nitta is betting $97 million that removing screenshots entirely can solve the cost problem plaguing vision-based agents. Agent-E works with text-only DOM, claims benchmark results that beat multimodal approaches, and acknowledges it's "not designed for dynamically changing environments." Every production website is a dynamically changing environment.
What You Lose When You Remove the Screenshots
A login button moves from top-right to bottom-left during a site redesign. The HTML is identical—same element, same attributes—but your agent can't find it anymore. The spatial cues that signaled "this matters" or "wait here" vanish with the visual information when you strip the page down to text.
Satya Nitta is betting $97 million that removing screenshots entirely can solve the cost problem plaguing vision-based agents. Agent-E works with text-only DOM, claims benchmark results that beat multimodal approaches, and acknowledges it's "not designed for dynamically changing environments." Every production website is a dynamically changing environment.
The Number That Matters
Standard Python requests library achieves roughly 2% success rate against Amazon's 2026 anti-bot system. Switch to curl_cffi, which mimics browser TLS fingerprints, and success climbs to 94%. That's a 47-fold improvement from addressing a single technical layer most developers never see.
The gap exists because modern systems compare what clients claim to be against what their TLS handshake reveals. Claim to be Chrome 120 while sending Python's TLS signature? Instant block. The Client Hello message, sent unencrypted during TLS negotiation, exposes version, cipher suites, extensions, and elliptic curves that uniquely identify each HTTP library.
Detection happens at the protocol level, before application logic even runs.
Practitioner Resources
