Field notes from the world of data extraction.
Articles, interviews and analysis on how data is gathered, used and fought over — written by the people closest to it.
Modern Scrapy for experienced developers: A new series
How to create production ready Scrapy projects to scrape the modern web. In this article we start the process of creating our spider, look at settings, and build a pipeline to help keep our data quality high.
A guide to Scrapy item types
Scrapy supports multiple item types, but which should you use, and why.
Podcast Ep08 - Scrapy, Python and mushroom soup
Scrapy's core handles crawling well and deliberately leaves almost everything else out: no bundled browser, no opinion about how you shape your data, no built-in answer for every anti-bot wrinkle. What it gives you instead is a clean way to add those things at the edges, exactly when you need them and never before.
Five reasons to attend this year’s Extract Summit
In its eighth year, Extract Summit is again shaping up to be the web data industry's premier gathering.
The missing middle ground in scrapy-playwright just got filled
You can now choose which Python browser library you want to use with scrapy-playwright. I go through why this is a huge deal for the right scraping demographic.
Harness Engineering #3- Headless mode: the minimal agent harness
What's the smallest harness that still works? Turns out it's already sitting inside almost every coding agent you have installed — headless mode: same loop, tools, and reasoning as the interactive agent, minus the human in the chair. We point it at a web page and pull clean, structured data out the other end in about ten lines.
Claude Fable 5 is the new best model for writing scrapers
We ran nine models, including the new GPT-5.6, through our Zyte Scraping Code Benchmark. Claude Fable 5 puts Sol and others in the shade - but it’s pricey, and the best extraction code still depends on the best infrastructure.
GPT-5.6, Fable 5, and GLM-5.2 entered a bar “crawl” and got hit by The Rate Limit
When OpenAI shipped GPT-5.6 and Anthropic's Fable 5 was sitting at the top of the price list, my question was not "which one wins a leaderboard." It was the one I actually pay for: for the scraping I do, how much model do I need to buy?
Treat your AI skills like software, starting with evals
Most AI skills are never tested — and it shows. Here's how Zyte evaluates scraping skills like real software, catching failures demos miss.
AI generated these Scrapy projects - why I won't ship them
What happens if you let AI create a Scrapy project from just a simple prompt? Here's what I got and what I had to fix.
Harness Engineering, part 2: harnessing a data extraction agent
Point it at a website, tell it which fields you want, get back clean structured records. That's the agent we're designing in this post — and the interesting part isn't the model, it's the harness decisions that make it actually reliable at scale.
Harness Engineering, part 1: what is an agent harness and why it matters
Same model, same weights, zero retraining — LangChain changed nothing but the scaffolding around a coding model and jumped it from 30th place to the top five on a benchmark. That scaffolding has a name: the harness. And it's the part you actually control.
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