Developer Open-Sources Self-Healing Web Scraper That Auto-Fixes Broken Selectors

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A developer has released Harvest, a free, MIT-licensed web scraper built to solve a common frustration: scrapers breaking whenever a website updates its HTML. When selectors fail due to site changes, Harvest uses a large language model to automatically regenerate and validate new CSS selectors, storing the full history locally for rollback. The tool also features a meaning-based semantic cache that can reduce token usage by 50–70% by recognising similar prompts, and a script generator that produces standalone Python scrapers requiring zero LLM tokens at runtime. Harvest runs as an MCP server, making it compatible with AI agents like Claude and Cursor, and includes built-in Cloudflare bypass via Chromium. The project, comprising roughly 9,500 lines of Python, was built in three weeks and is available on GitHub, though it currently has no established community.

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Developer Open-Sources Harvest, a Self-Healing Web Scraper Powered by LLMs

A developer has released Harvest, an open-source web scraper designed to automatically repair itself when target websites change their HTML structure. The tool uses a large language model to detect broken selectors, generate replacements, and validate them against a schema — storing the full selector history locally for rollback. Harvest also implements semantic caching, storing extraction results by meaning rather than exact query text, which the developer reports reduces LLM token consumption by 50–70%. Additional features include structural DOM diffing to highlight page changes and a script generator that performs a one-time LLM analysis to produce reusable, zero-token scraping scripts. The project is available on GitHub and can be installed via pip, with support for Cloudflare bypass and an MCP server interface for integration with AI agents.

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