The latest articles on DEV Community by yash jindal (@itsyashjindal). https://dev.to/itsyashjindal https://media2.dev.to/dynamic/image/width=90,height=90,fit=cover,gravity=auto,format=auto/https:%2F%2Fdev-to-uploads.s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com%2Fuploads%2Fuser%2Fprofile_image%2F3517368%2F48fb87a6-c983-4204-9ddc-445913798c68.jpeg https://dev.to/itsyashjindal en yash jindal Thu, 08 Oct 2026 07:47:07 +0000 https://dev.to/itsyashjindal/i-tried-to-build-an-ai-agent-that-applies-to-jobs-for-me-the-ai-was-the-easy-part-2g40 https://dev.to/itsyashjindal/i-tried-to-build-an-ai-agent-that-applies-to-jobs-for-me-the-ai-was-the-easy-part-2g40 <p>I have been learning Agentic AI for a while now. Concepts made sense, the demos worked, and I felt ready to build something for myself.</p> <p>So I picked a project I actually needed: an agent that applies to jobs for me.</p> <p>Stack: Node.js, Playwright, OpenAI.</p> <p>I thought the LLM part would be the challenge. It was not. The browser part broke me.</p> <h2> What went wrong </h2> <ol> <li><p>Bot detection. Playwright got flagged almost immediately.</p></li> <li><p>Cloudflare CAPTCHA. Once I got past the first wall, this was the second one.</p></li> <li><p>Platform rules. When I finally got through both, I found out the platform does not allow scraping, and my account could get blocked. That is a real risk when the account is the one you use for your actual job search.</p></li> </ol> <h2> What other developers told me </h2> <p>I asked around and got a different answer from everyone:</p> <ul> <li><p>Use paid proxies with proper header params</p></li> <li><p>Save the HTML first, then extract the data from it</p></li> <li><p>A few more tricks that worked for a day and then stopped</p></li> </ul> <p>Out of everything I tried, only paid proxies worked reliably.</p> <h2> The real problem: cost </h2> <p>This is a small personal agent, not a product. But look at the bill:</p> <p>| Paid proxies - Don't want to pay for this <br> | VPS - Yes, needed in my case <br> | OpenAI API - Yes <br> | Other small costs - They add up </p> <p>And there are already platforms offering this kind of agent at a very low price. So spending every month on my own version stops making sense fast.</p> <h2> What I am thinking now </h2> <p>A few directions I am considering instead of fighting bot detection:</p> <ul> <li><p>Use official sources where they exist: job APIs, RSS feeds, and email alerts instead of scraping pages.</p></li> <li><p>Keep a human in the loop: let the agent find, filter and match jobs, and draft the answers, while I do the final click myself.</p></li> <li><p>Spend the LLM budget on matching, not on browsing: that is where the agent adds real value anyway.</p></li> </ul> <p>I have not settled on any of these yet.</p> <h2> My question to you </h2> <ul> <li><p>Have you built something like this without paid proxies?</p></li> <li><p>Is there a cheaper or smarter approach I am missing?</p></li> <li><p>Or is "agent applies for me" simply the wrong problem to solve?</p></li> </ul> <p>I started this discussion on LinkedIn and some good answers are already coming in. I would love to have your take there too:</p> <p>👉 <a href="https://lnkd.in/p/eCuRfEZB" rel="noopener noreferrer">https://lnkd.in/p/eCuRfEZB</a></p> <p>Or drop a comment here. I read everything.</p> discuss ai node javascript