I’ve been meaning to test out the ready-to-use webkit templates to see if they actually save time or if they’re just a shortcut that ultimately requires as much customization as building from scratch.
My assumption going in was that a ready-made template would handle maybe 70-80% of the work, and I’d spend the remaining 20-30% customizing it for my specific site. But I’m curious if that’s realistic.
I grabbed a data extraction template for ecommerce sites and started adapting it to a specific store. The template was well-built—good structure, clear logic flow. But the moment I tried to use it on my target site, I ran into selector mismatches, timing issues specific to how the site loads, and some quirks in the HTML structure.
Now, adapting these things individually wasn’t hard. But I’m wondering: how much time did the template actually save me? If the core workflow is solid but selectors are completely site-specific, was I really that far ahead of writing the workflow myself?
Maybe I’m being unrealistic about what a template is supposed to do. Or maybe the real value is elsewhere—in the architecture patterns, the error handling logic, the thinking that went into building the workflow.
Has anyone else used templates and tracked how much customization actually happened? Did you feel like it was a genuine time savings, or did it just move the work around?