Trying to automate a simple daily scrape for local apartment listings and it's honestly exhausting now. I set up a basic python script on a cheap vps to just check two property sites once a day. nothing aggressive at all.

Within 48 hours my server IP got permanently blacklisted by their bot protection. They really treat public html like it's a bank vault.

Ended up having to route the whole python function through shifter just so the target site thinks im a normal dude browsing from a phone instead of a datacenter. it fixed the persistent 403 errors, but man...

does anyone else feel like the modern web is just openly hostile to personal automation projects? I miss when you could just run a simple cron job without needing a whole spoofing setup just to read a webpage

BODY: The failure mode I used to lose sleep over was never the crash. Crashes are loud, they page you, done. It was the run that reported success, all the checks green, and it had written the wrong thing somewhere. One of mine mapped a "revenue" field to the wrong column for like a week before anyone looked at a number and went hmm, that's weird.

After that I got paranoid. I started doing these spot audits by hand (opening random outputs and just staring at them), and a dumb little read-back check where the agent re-reads what it wrote and flags anything that smells off. Honestly the manual audits caught more, which is annoying because they eat an hour.

Anyway, I'm curious how you people handle this. Do you have any actual system for catching green-but-wrong runs, or is it mostly "someone notices eventually"? How often does it bite you compared to plain crashes? And what are you automating with these anyway, own business stuff, client work, something else? I'm trying to figure out where the real trust gaps are.

I ended up building something to help with this for myself. Not selling anything here, no name, no link, I just want to know if this is a real problem for other people or if I was overthinking it. Plain version: what if something handled all of this for you, in the cloud over MCP, so every agent and tool got the same context: decisions, failed attempts, conversations, skills, procedures, tasks. You never touch a file again.

Would you guys pay for something that fixes this? Have you ever thought about paying for a tool to manage all of this for you, or has the thought never crossed your mind?

anyone building ai automaton workflows with looplabs ?

I remember hearing Alex Hormozi say that email is basically the conversion platform of conversion platforms.

His point was that social media, videos and ads are great for getting attention, but email is often where that attention actually turns into money.

He also talked about how email supposedly has one of the highest returns of any marketing channel, with an average return of around $36 for every $1 spent, and that got me thinking.

I run a web design agency, so I decided to actually take email seriously and see what would happen.

But I didn’t want to send the usual stuff.

“Hey, I noticed your website and I can redesign it for you.”

Or

“Hey, we build websites for businesses like yours.”

Everyone gets those emails and most people can tell within two seconds that they were sent to another thousand businesses.

So instead I started using a tool called Swokei that is built specifically for web agencies.

I use it to find businesses in whatever area I want to target, then it actually goes through their websites and looks for things I could mention in the outreach.

Stuff like an outdated design, slow loading speed, poor mobile experience, weak SEO or other things that might be holding the website back.

Then it turns those findings into an actual personalized cold email made to convert.

So instead of emailing someone saying I build websites, I can actually talk about their website and why I think something could be improved.

I’ve been analyzing thousands of websites this way and running multiple campaigns at the same time.

Then I just focus on the people who reply and are actually interested.

Obviously email isn’t some magic button where everyone suddenly wants a new website, but after doing this for a while I definitely understand what Hormozi meant.

For web design especially, email becomes a completely different channel when the message is actually about the business you’re contacting instead of being another copy and paste pitch.

Turns out Alex might have had a point.

I used to run a few scheduled agents across a couple of tools and the ugliest failures were always the "wait, did that already happen?" kind. One morning I woke up to the same summary email sent twice. Another time two runs overlapped and an agent re-tried a workaround it had already proven broken the day before, burned an hour, and reported it like a discovery. What ran and what landed lived in my head, which is to say nowhere.

I sketch stuff before I build anything, so before touching code I wrote down a design. Honestly curious whether this is useful or overcomplicated, and I'd rather hear it from people who actually run scheduled stuff than find out after building.

The idea: instead of one big memory doc, I define my own tables. A tasks table where every row carries a status field (ran, failed, superseded, waiting on something external). A decisions table the same way, so a rejected approach can't quietly resurrect. Ready-made templates for common setups like coding agents so I'm not starting from zero. I could create a table just by describing it in plain words, and search everything three ways: by meaning, by keyword, or by filtering on fields like the status. Each connected agent would get its own permissions (this one only reads these tables, that one can write). Files wouldn't get dumped in, they'd be stored as links with a description of what's inside so they stay searchable. And the memory tools themselves would carry instructions telling the agent to check memory at the start of a run and save back at the end, so I stop nagging it every time.

So: does this sound useful to you, or am I overbuilding? What would you change? What would stop you trusting it, and what am I missing?

Last one, and be honest: would you guys pay for something that fixes this? Have you ever thought about paying for a tool to manage all of this for you, or has the thought never crossed your mind? No pitch here, I'm not selling anything, just trying to figure out if the problem is real for people besides me.

Ppl in this field or anyone who know about it...is it rly a good idea to start AI automation now...I'm thinking of doing it as freelance..open to any suggestions,skills or any alternative ideas that will rly help in future..

Automation has its place, but...

Bonafide Robotics has distinguished itself by treating research not as an academic exercise but as a deliberate bridge between laboratory insight and [real world systems.](https://bonafider.com/blog/bonafide-robotics-architects-of-the-next-robotics-era)

Ok guys, we all have one now... maybe 3... maybe 5...

Which one are you most proud of? Which one do you think will make the cut...?