Automation & agents · Claude

Have Claude write a script that pulls data from websites for your job

Idea + starter prompt, not run by us yet

For: Contractors and staff who spend hours copying information off websites by hand

For a contract job, Claude produced a Python script that gathers details from websites, which was too slow to do by hand. The person tells Claude to begin, it runs the work and returns the result. Their part is knowing where to look and handing in the finished job.

Steps

1. Write down which sites you check, what you copy from them and where it ends up.
2. Paste the starter prompt and ask Claude for a script, not for Claude to read each page itself.
3. Run the script on two or three pages first and compare the output to what you would copy by hand.
4. Check each site's terms before you run it at scale.
5. Save the script and a short how-to so you can rerun it each week.

Starter prompt

I do this task by hand: I visit [list of sites or page types] and copy [fields] into [spreadsheet or report].

Write a Python script that does the extraction for me. Do not read the pages yourself one by one. The script should do the work.

First explain your plan and what the output file will look like. Then test it on [two example pages] only and show me the result. Do not log into anything or submit forms. I will check the output before running it on the full list.

Original post: Reddit · found via agentusecases.ai. Written up in our own words. We haven't run it, so test it on made-up data first.