I’ve been looking at ready-to-use templates for puppeteer-style browser automation, and the pitch is appealing—click a few times, customize your selectors, and you’re running automations instead of building workflows from zero. But I want to cut through the marketing and understand what’s actually faster.
Part of me wonders if templates just move the problem around. Like, yeah, you avoid writing initial boilerplate, but don’t you still need to understand the template’s structure, figure out how to adapt it to your specific site, and debug when something doesn’t work? Or is the time savings actually noticeable enough to justify hunting for the right template versus writing a basic automation myself?
I also curious whether templates handle edge cases well. A login template might work for Form A but fail on Form B because of subtle differences in field names or CSRF token handling. So does using a template actually save you from learning how browser automation works, or does it just defer that learning until you hit a problem?
For people who have actually used templates for real tasks—not toy examples—did they genuinely ship faster? Or did you end up rewriting more than half of it to match your actual workflow?