Author(s): Jamieparker
Originally published on Towards AI.
What works, what costs you more than the pricing page says, and the security problem nobody mentions.
My AI agents were frozen in the past. Not slightly behind, but completely stuck at training cutoff, confidently wrong about current pricing pages, updated API docs, and anything that changed in the last six months. The fix was obvious: give them live web access. The hard part was doing it without building a second project just to support the first one.
I’d already gone through the standard path: BeautifulSoup for simple pages, Playwright for JavaScript-heavy ones, custom retry logic when sites blocked me, proxy rotation when they blocked me harder. It worked. But maintaining it was a part-time job with nothing to do with the agent I was actually building.
