scrape

A general guide for scraping a website, meaning automatically collecting information from its pages. It starts with a small sample and records a reusable approach for sites without a dedicated guide.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when given a website URL or asked to extract data from a site. It helps test a strategy on a small number of items and document the result for later crawls.
Why use it?
It keeps an unfamiliar scraping task bounded and practical. It provides time limits, checks for page structure and blocking, and escalation steps when simple requests fail.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/agentcomputerai/torch/scrape
Any agent
npx skills add AgentComputerAI/torch --skill scrape
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/AgentComputerAI/torch

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 41 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 3,464 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 2 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5 $0.00041 $0.03464
Opus 5 $0.00020 $0.01732
Sonnet 5 $0.00008 $0.00693
Haiku 4.5 $0.00004 $0.00346

Measured yesterday against content hash 6943e63156ec, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

scrape scanned grade A with 2 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured yesterday.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Makes network callslowCapability

Not a fault in itself. Listed so you know the mod talks to something, and to what.

- Phase 0 (curl): 2 minutes max

Runs shell commandslowCapability

Expected in a hook, worth knowing in a rule or an instructions file.

import { spawn } from "node:child_process";
skills/scrape/SKILL.md · 289 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 289 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Goal of a first-time scrape

You are a scout, not a crawler. On a site that does not already have a skill in skills/sites/<slug>/, the goal is to prove a strategy works on a small sample (5-20 items) and write a reusable playbook — NOT to extract every row on the site. Full crawls come on re-runs once the skill exists.

Budget

  • ~5 minutes total wall clock for a new-site scrape. The user is watching a clock you cannot see.
  • Per-phase time boxes:
    • Phase 0 (curl): 2 minutes max
    • Phase 1 (framework recon): 3 minutes max
    • Phase 2 (browser): 5 minutes max
  • Once extraction works on even 5 valid items, STOP. Commit to that approach, write the skill, ship. Do not switch strategies to find a cleaner one. Do not chase pagination unless explicitly asked. Every extra minute you spend "improving" a working scrape is a minute spent not writing the skill.
  • After two failed strategies on the same page, stop escalating. Write a skill documenting what you tried and which layer failed. A half-skill is more valuable than a timeout with nothing saved.

Background execution

Run scrapers as background processes, not synchronous bash. You have pi-processes tools — use them. Synchronous bash node scrape.js blocks the turn, makes you blind to progress, and prevents steering. Background execution lets you watch logs, catch errors early, and kill a run once you have enough data.

Pattern:

  1. Write scrape.js
  2. Spawn it as a background process, tag it with the slug
  3. Tail its log output
  4. As soon as you see the first 5 items extract cleanly, you can either let it finish or kill it
  5. Read ./output/<slug>.json, verify, write the skill

Naming invariants

Derive the slug ONCE at the start of the scrape from the brand/site name. Lowercase [a-z0-9-] only, no dots, no TLDs, no www. prefix. Examples: amazon, hackernews, mcmaster, digikey.

  • Output file: ./output/<slug>.jsonone file per scrape, no variants
  • Skill file: ./skills/sites/<slug>/SKILL.md — directory name === slug === frontmatter name:
  • Scratch files during exploration: prefix with _scratch_ so they're easy to delete

Read the full file on GitHub · 289 lines

Files

What ships with it

3 files beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. yesterday First seen · 289 lines · 41 tokens per session scan A 6943e63156ec

Subscribe to this mod's changes

scrape is a skill published in the GitHub repository AgentComputerAI/torch (5 stars, last pushed 4mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 41 tokens to every session and 3,464 once invoked, about $0.0002 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 2 findings (makes network calls, runs shell commands). No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-31.

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