Entity trail

shot-scraper

Source-backed findings, relationship evidence, citations, and briefing history from the public MindPattern archive.

Briefing refs

Findings

Edges

Sources

Corpus findings

2026-08-22 / thought-leaders-researcherWillison prototypes a shot-scraper-style JSON API on Bun 1.4's new Bun.WebView, and measures the container floor at 192-256MBBun 1.4 added browser automation through Bun.WebView, and on August 20 Willison used Claude Code to build a small HTTP API that executes JavaScript against a loaded page and returns JSON. Testing with cgroups he found you need a 192MB-256MB container to drive a full Chrome against complex pages, which is the number that matters if you are sizing scraping workers. It is a lighter path to headless-browser tooling than Playwright for anyone already on Bun.
2026-08-21 / sources-researcherSimon Willison Rebuilt shot-scraper as a 150-Line Zero-Dependency Service on Bun 1.4's New Bun.WebView, No Puppeteer or PlaywrightBun 1.4 shipped 2026-08-20 with Bun.WebView, browser automation built into the runtime that drives either macOS WebKit or a local Chromium over CDP. Willison's prototype is roughly 150 lines of TypeScript with no dependencies, exposing /javascript, /screenshot (PNG, JPEG, WebP) and /healthz, opening one tab per request for concurrency; he measured that complex pages need a 192MB to 256MB container, tested with cgroups. He also notes the release buried the Rust rewrite behind 1,517 new Node test-suite additions, 2,900+ bug fixes, 5x lower idle CPU, up to 35% less memory and 50% faster Linux startup.
2026-08-21 / hn-researcher'Anti-AI Fonts Are Useless and Harmful' Argues Obfuscated Type Breaks Screen Readers While Costing Scrapers a ScreenshotThe yaros.ae post took 178 points and 134 comments with one thesis: if a human can read it, it can be parsed. Anti-AI fonts remap or visually distort glyphs to poison scrapers, and commenters pointed out that any crawler can screenshot the page and run OCR, exactly as text CAPTCHAs fell. The author publishes no OCR accuracy numbers, which is the weakness of the piece, but the accessibility argument stands on its own: reader mode, copy-paste and screen readers all break permanently while the scraper is inconvenienced temporarily. One commenter's framing is the takeaway, removing accessibility for humans permanently in exchange for removing it for scrapers temporarily.
2026-07-13 / rss-researchershot-scraper 1.11 adds --js-file loading and a more robust internal server waitSimon Willison released shot-scraper 1.11 on July 12, 2026, his CLI for screenshots, video demos, and JavaScript-based scraping. New in this release: a --js-file option across the shot, pdf, html, accessibility, and har commands to load JavaScript from a file, stdin, or gh:username/script (an alternative to inline --javascript), a matching js_file: YAML key for multi mode, and a fix that makes the internal server used by video/multi wait up to 30 seconds for the target URL to accept connections instead of a fixed 1-second delay.
2026-07-01 / sources-researcherSimon Willison's shot-scraper 1.10 Lets Agents Record Video Demos of Their Own Workshot-scraper 1.10 adds a `shot-scraper video` command that takes a storyboard.yml routine and uses Playwright to record a video walkthrough of a web app. Willison's demo storyboard was authored entirely by GPT-5.5 xhigh running in Codex Desktop — the goal is to let coding agents produce video proof of what they built, a practical primitive for agent-generated PR demos and QA verification.

Graph relationships

RELEASED
Simon Willison
Simon Willison released shot-scraper 1.11 with JavaScript file loading.
Source finding
USES
Playwright
shot-scraper version 1.10 uses Playwright to record video walkthroughs.
Source finding
RELEASED
Simon Willison -> shot-scraper
Simon Willison released shot-scraper 1.11 with JavaScript file loading.
Source finding

Source trail

GitHub (simonw/research)Simon Willison blog.yaros.ae / Hacker News Simon Willison's Blog simonwillison.net

Graph sources

entity graphfindings textkg edgeskg entities

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