playwright

Five hours of 'healthy' while the browser inside the container had been dead since minute one. Notes on user, HOME, and shallow healthchecks.

Re-logging into DeepSeek via VNC every week got old. I transferred the whole session into Camofox instead: cookies, token, keepalive.

TL;DR: DeepSeek sessions in Camofox died because logging in means two layers: HttpOnly cookies and a localStorage userToken for Bearer API calls. Importing cookies alone patched half the state, so the login page persisted. Three scripts merge cookies into Playwright's storage-state.json, inject the wrapped token, and poll every five minutes to confirm the session.

The text visibly entered the textarea, yet React never saw a change. Why plain assignment fails on controlled components and how the native prototype setter fixes it.

TL;DR: Automating React apps like DeepSeek fails when you set textarea.value directly, because React replaces the setter on each element instance and swallows non-user input events. The fix: grab the native setter from HTMLTextAreaElement.prototype, call it with your text, then dispatch a bubbling input event. Since the icon-only send button has no label, press Enter instead.

An accessibility snapshot caught my own prompt instead of the AI answer. The fix: echo rejection, clipboard-first extraction, and a recover subcommand.

TL;DR: Chat scrapers fail when the answer anchor matches the user's own echoed prompt, so the fix filters template markers and length. Virtualized rendering hides offscreen text anyway, making clipboard reads via the Copy button the reliable data path over DOM snapshots. A .url sidecar written before polling lets the script recover finished answers without resending.

Scraping an AI chat answer from the DOM gets you half of it. The full text lives behind the Copy button, plus a strict output contract.

TL;DR: Chat UIs use virtualization, so most of the AI's answer never exists in the DOM and scrolling won't load it. The fix layers a Copy-button click to read the clipboard, an accessibility tree snapshot, and innerText as fallbacks. The real win: define an output contract upfront — code block plus sentinel marker — so scraping becomes deterministic.

Free Qwen chat via Playwright is now the primary draft engine for my article cron, with a local router9 fallback wired like a circuit breaker.

TL;DR: The author scrapes Qwen's free web chat via Playwright, copying answers from the clipboard since virtualized DOM rendering hides long replies. Knowing free tiers die without notice, a circuit breaker routes to local router9 after two failures, giving genuinely separate failure domains. The bet isn't that scraping lasts, just that the pipeline keeps running when it doesn't.