I Had an AI Agent Scrape Google Maps Instead of Writing a Scraper. Here's What It Cost.

Summary: I ran a Claude agent with only browser tools (no pre-written scraper code) against 60 coffee-shop listings on Google Maps across 3 US cities, and compared it to a plain Playwright script on the same pages. The agent got every field right on every checked row, but cost 190k-540k processed tokens and 23-35 seconds per place, against 6-14...