This is exactly the problem that keeps automation engineers up at night. Hard-coded selectors are fragile by design.
What you’re describing is where AI-generated workflows shine. Instead of manually writing brittle selectors, you describe the task—“extract product names and prices from the results table”—and let the AI handle the implementation. The generated workflow uses intelligent element detection instead of CSS selectors, so when the site redesigns, it tends to keep working because it’s understanding the actual data structure, not memorizing specific DOM paths.
I’ve seen this approach reduce maintenance overhead significantly. The generated workflows also tend to include built-in error handling and fallback strategies that you’d normally have to write yourself.
Latenode has this AI Copilot feature that does exactly this. You describe your automation goal in plain text, it generates a ready-to-run workflow with resilience built in. Worth checking out at https://latenode.com if you want to see how this actually works in practice.