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ExtensionDash: tracking a browser extension from your agent

After shipping two browser extensions this year — Reverse Image Search Anywhere and Stackpeek — I still could not answer the simplest question about a listing: is it working?

  • ExtensionDash tracks Chrome and Firefox browser extensions
  • Scrapes stores nightly for installs, ratings, rankings
  • Reports three states: never scanned, scanned found, scanned absent

The last mile of a scraper is a human copying a spreadsheet

I scrape product cards from online stores for a content bank with an Actor of my own . The Actor finishes, the dataset fills up, and then a person exports it, checks it, and pastes it into the tool…

  • Last mile of scraper performed manually by human
  • Apify MCP connectors aim to eliminate manual process
  • Connector enables Actor to communicate with third-party services

Revisiting Joel's Test - exe.dev blog

  • Joel Spolsky's 12-step test remains relevant despite tech advancements
  • Shelley Test replaces human code review with LLM adversarial reviews
  • Athena agentic bot supervises continuous deployments and logs

Two Actors, one agent, and the three ways my chain broke

A client asked a question that sounds simple: which sellers on the marketplaces are risky to buy from? Answering it takes two steps.

  • Two actors processed different task parts, but agent failed to connect them properly
  • First actor scraped sellers with tax ID, legal name, store URL; second actor calculated risk scores
  • Data format mismatch, empty strings as input caused incorrect risk scores and chain failure

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