I spent the last few months building a web extraction API. Here's what surprised me most: developers don't need another scraper. They need extraction that stops breaking. Every web scraping thread I read has the same arc: Write a BeautifulSoup/Scrapy scraper It works for two weeks The target site changes one div Scraper breaks at 2am Dev swears, rewrites selectors Repeat The alternative everyone reaches for next: "I'll use Playwright. No, I'll use Puppeteer. No, a headless browser with proxy rotation. No..." But here's the thing most people miss: the problem isn't fetching. It's parsing. The extraction-first approach At Haunt API (which I built), we flipped the model. Instead of fetch-then-parse, the user describes what they want in plain English: "Extract product name, price, and stock status from this page." The AI reads the page like a human would — it understands context, not CSS selectors. When the site changes layout next week, the extraction still works because the prompt targets meaning, not markup.…