Developer interest
Articles from the Zyte blog about Developer interest.
The harness matters more than the model - Podcast EP07
"The model is the engine — but the harness is everything else." In Episode 7, we dig into why the infrastructure layer around your AI model matters more than the model itself, rank the best models available right now, and ask whether the open-weighted revolution is about to make frontier subscriptions obsolete.
How to build your first Scrapy extension
My Scrapy project now plays a triumphant fanfare when a crawl finishes clean and a sad trombone when it doesn't, which is also how I finally learned what Scrapy's extension points are actually for.
Now what exactly is loop engineering? And where do Anthropic's Fable 5 model and web scraping fit in?
A viral clip from Claude Code's creator put a name to something a lot of us have been circling: loop engineering. Here's why web scraping may be its best-fit domain — and what that means in practice.
Automate deployment of your web scraper on VPS with Ubuntu 24.04 cloud-init
Your VPS is ready, but now you need to work through the same sequence you have run a dozen times before: apt update, apt install python3-pip, pip install scrapy, playwright install chromium, the Chromium dependency list that never installs cleanly on the first try, Redis, possibly Postgres, whatever else this particular project needs.
NotAnInterview: “I Have Superpowers Now"
The problem was a project with 12,000 websites to crawl, and there’s no world where you write custom spiders for 12,000 websites, not with a human team and certainly not sustainably. So Javier built a workflow: a set of AI prompts that could analyze a website, figure out its structure, and generate a crawl configuration that a generic spider could then use.
Flatcar Linux for web scrapers: deploy immutable containers with just one config file
The next time you spin up a VPS to give it a persistent home, you spend the better part of an afternoon rebuilding from memory. Here's a tool to help using Flatcar Linux
My agentic coding setup: Claude Code, multi-agent orchestration, and how I actually work
Ayan's 4 agent team, using Claude's /goal, and the models and coding agents he uses to code effectively.
Are programming practices relevant anymore?
From LLM-powered extraction to agentic pipelines, here's how AI is reshaping every stage of the web scraping workflow in 2026 -- and what it means for your stack.
Is your AI coding assistant stuck in the past?
AI coding tools like Copilot can suggest outdated code and practices. Learn why this happens and how developers can ensure they use the latest standards.
Stop using Python requests for web scraping: Use these modern modules instead
While the 'Requests' library remains the default choice for many Python developers due to its reliability and extensive documentation, the Python HTTP landscape has evolved considerably. Modern alternatives now offer significant advantages, including built-in asynchronous support, HTTP/2 compatibility, enhanced performance, and up-to-date TLS handling.
AI and the web: What 2025 changed and what comes next
2025 was the year AI learned to reason. From reasoning-first LLMs to autonomous agents and a reshaped web economy, this retrospective explores what changed—and what’s coming next.
Memo to CTOs: Don’t build the product
Zyte’s CTO says great tech leaders don’t work on software, they work systems that make software.