AI agents for scraping ops: are you letting them triage + retry, or is that asking for trouble?

I keep running into a dumb problem lately: pages that return 200 OK and look kinda legit, but the payload is subtly broken (key fields empty, placeholders, swapped DOM variants). No big red “blocked” banner, just silent bad data.

I’m trying to see if an agent loop (Openclaw-style, or anything similar) can reduce the weekly whack-a-mole. Not “agent writes my scraper”... more like “agent keeps the pipeline honest”. (maybe thats wishful thinking idk)

My baseline is boring on purpose: Playwright for JS-heavy pages + an HTTP/TLS path for easy endpoints, resi/ISP proxies with sticky sessions for flows, queue workers, parquet + some Postgres.

What I’m wrapping around it right now:

• Triage: classify failures as block vs DOM change vs rate limit using status + HTML fingerprints + timing + screenshots on a few canary URLs

• Retry policy: decide the next move (swap proxy / lower concurrency / flip HTTP->browser / backoff)

• Validation: treat “200” as suspicious unless fields pass checks (missingness spikes, outlier prices, sudden schema drift)

• Suggested fixes: propose selector / JSONPath edits, but no auto-merges and it’s not allowed to touch anything outside extraction rules

Constraints I’m holding it to:

• +~2s max on the hot path

• +$0.20 per 1k pages max in extra agent calls

• Human-in-the-loop for anything that changes extraction logic

If someone posts a real workflow (signals, thresholds, what actions you permit, what reduced on-call), I’ll consider sending payment to the most useful write-up. tbh I’m more interested in what failed than what worked on a demo.

Do you use agents for QA/triage only, or do you let them actually take retry actions?

What’s your best soft-block detector (field missingness? HTML signatures? diffing canary screenshots?)

For retries, what proxy class has been the least flaky for you in 2026 — ISP, mobile, resi pool, hybrid?

If you think agents are a trap, what’s your simplest non-agent setup for catching silent bad data?