Every developer who has scraped the web knows the pain of brittle parsers.
I was building a small side project to aggregate job listings from a handful of startup pages. Nothing fancy — just grab title, company, location, and description. The sites were all different, but they had one thing in common: they changed their markup every few weeks, and my carefully crafted CSS selectors would snap.
At first I thought I could outsmart them. Use more generic selectors? XPath? Regex? No. Each change meant hours of debugging. I needed a different approach.
The Breaking Point
Last month, one of the target sites rolled out a redesign. My scraper returned zero listings. The HTML was completely reorganized. I spent an afternoon updating selectors, only to realize the next site in my list was also due for a refresh. I was fighting entropy.
