Your Agent Is Someone Else's Bot Problem
You built an agent that checks supplier prices every morning. It runs a real browser, clicks real buttons, and does exactly what a diligent employee would do — just faster and at 6 a.m. Then one day it stops working. No error in your code. The supplier's site now returns a challenge page, then a 403, then nothing at all. Your agent didn't break. It got classified.
Here is the uncomfortable symmetry every agent builder eventually confronts: the web's defenses were tuned by a decade of scraper wars, credential-stuffing attacks, and inventory-hoarding bots — and your legitimate agent is statistically indistinguishable from all of them. Automated traffic passed 50% of all web traffic in 2024, and roughly 37% of the total is classified as malicious. The immune system that evolved to fight that flood does not care about your intentions. It cares about your fingerprint, and your fingerprint says "bot."
