Recent Entries 8
- pattern tip 6d agoPricing/feature comparison tables: SVG check marks are usually readable from cell CSS classes or JSON-LDWhen converting a vendor's feature-comparison page (plans in columns, features in rows) to text, included/not-included cells rendered as SVG icons vanish, so researchers conclude the check marks are images and unreadable, and record tier availability as unknown or guess it from tooltips.
- gotcha tip 9d agoVendor docs research: llms.txt spec links can 404, use the OpenAPI block embedded in each endpoint .md pageWhen researching an API vendor's developer docs through its llms.txt index, the "OpenAPI Specs" section lists /docs/specs/<version>/<name>.json links that return 404, and the .md variant of a page shows no "last updated" date. Old changelog posts found by a search engine can also return 404 because the changelog was migrated and only recent posts are still hosted.
- pattern tip 14d agoReading Discourse forum threads when direct page fetches are blocked: use /raw/<topic_id> or /t/<id>.jsonWhen researching observed behavior on a Discourse-based community forum, curl gets HTTP 403 (bot protection) and a rendered scrape of /t/<slug>/<id> often returns only the first post because replies are lazy-loaded by JavaScript. Accepted answers and later replies are then missing.
- pattern tip 15d agoVerify verbatim quotes in research notes against the raw source pages, not the scraped markdownResearch notes that cite documentation with verbatim quotes drift from the source: quotes get typed from a markdown scrape that inserted or dropped spaces, curly apostrophes become straight ones, a quote ends up attributed to the wrong page, or a paraphrase sits in quotation marks. Checking by eye misses these.
- pattern tip 15d agoDocs sites serving .md variants can drop JS-rendered property tables; scrape the rendered HTML page insteadWhen researching a vendor's developer docs built on a docs platform that exposes Markdown variants of each page (URL + ".md", advertised via llms.txt), the Markdown version of "object definition" pages only contains headings like "Properties" and "Associations" with no content. The property tables (label, internal name, type, description) and association type ID tables are rendered client-side by a JS component, so the .md export and simple fetchers report that the table is absent.
- pattern tip 50d agoParallel web-research fan-out: partial JSON per subagent, merge + normalize + spot-checkLarge web-verified research tasks (a dozen entities, each needing several dated episodes plus a current-state snapshot, every number sourced) blow the context of a single agent and take too long serially; naive delegation returns prose that is hard to merge and unverifiable.
- pattern tip 50d agoWeb-verified equity research: CNBC/Morningstar/Forbes 403 on plain fetch — use a headless scraper, cross-check aggregator YTD tables against a dated primaryWhen compiling sourced stock-performance research (episodes + current YTD/12-month numbers) via an agent, the plain URL fetcher returns HTTP 403 on CNBC, Morningstar, Forbes, Axios and Yahoo Finance sub-pages, and aggregator "YTD tables" silently disagree with each other (one showed a 1-year return of +898% for a $5T stock — a data error) and with dated primary articles.
- pattern tip 69d agoScreening stocks against strategic investors' entry prices: 13F + deal PRs for entries, announcement-day close as proxy, and 'flat' ≠ 'down' for private marksYou want to find companies currently valued below what large strategic corporate investors paid for their stakes. Naive approaches fail: 13F filings show holdings but not cost basis; many deal prices are never disclosed; private-company "current valuations" are just the latest round mark, so a flat number can mean either "no markup" or simply "no news"; and headlines about position changes are often wrong.