Something changed in 2026, and it is worth naming precisely rather than dismissing.
You can now describe a website to a model and get back a working scraper in under a minute. It handles the pagination. It gets the selectors right. It produces clean JSON on the first run. Ten years ago that was a day of work for a competent engineer, and the fact that it is now a minute is a real advance, not a party trick.
Then it runs for four days and quietly stops being right.
We have watched this cycle enough times in the last year to think the failure is structural rather than a prompt-quality issue. The gap is not between a good scraper and a bad one. It is between the problem that generation solves and the problem that production actually is. Here is where the seam sits, and what the generated code is genuinely good for once you see it.
Generation solves the part that was never expensive
