Apify Autoplans — AI Web Scraper & Scraping Code Generator

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AI web scraping assistant for VS Code. A browser agent runs on your machine to work out a site’s structure — selectors, pagination, dynamic content — and drafts Apify Actor code from what it finds, as language model tools, an @apify chat participant and Actor Agent sessions.

Installation

Launch VS Code Quick Open (Ctrl+P), paste the following command, and press enter.

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Apify Autoplans — AI web scraping assistant for VS Code

Apify Autoplans drives a real browser from VS Code to work out how a website is built, then writes Apify Actor code against what it found. Browser automation runs on your machine, so pages behind a login or a cookie wall are reachable the same way they are in your own browser.

What it contributes

Language model tools

Five tools that GitHub Copilot's agent mode can call on its own, or that you can reference in a prompt by name:

Tool	Reference	What it does
`apify_scrape_website`	`#scrapeWebsite`	Extract data from a URL against an instruction
`apify_learn_from_website`	`#learnFromWebsite`	Analyse a site to work out how to extract something
`apify_create_scraper`	`#createApifyScraper`	Draft an Apify Actor for a target site
`apify_analyze_html`	`#analyzeHtml`	Identify selectors and pagination on a page
`apify_test_scraper`	`#testScraper`	Review scraper code against a live URL

These run a Python browser agent on your machine; see Requirements below for what it needs.

`@apify` chat participant

@apify in the chat view, with /scrape, /create, /analyze, /test and /help. It sends the browser agent's observations to the endpoint in apifyAutoplans.proxyEndpoint for analysis, so it needs that backend to be reachable — see Requirements.

Actor Agent sessions

Apify Autoplans: New Actor Agent Session opens a coding agent in its own editor window, with the Apify Actor rules in apify-rules loaded. Set apifyAutoplans.agentOpenIn to tab to keep sessions as editor tabs. The agent runs on your machine with your own models and subscriptions, and is installed once with npm install -g autoplans-agent.

Prompt files

createScraper, analyzeWebsite, debugScraper, optimizeScraper and testScraper ship as prompt files you can run from chat.

Requirements

VS Code 1.95+
Python 3 on PATH. The language model tools run a Python browser agent; on first use the extension builds a virtual environment beside the extension and installs browser-use, playwright, langchain-core and pydantic into it. Playwright's browsers are not downloaded for you — run playwright install in that environment if the agent cannot start a browser.
For Actor Agent sessions: Node 18+ and npm install -g autoplans-agent
An API key, set with Apify Autoplans: Set API Key
For @apify and the Run Agent with Browser Use, Create Apify Scraper and Learn from Website commands: a backend at apifyAutoplans.proxyEndpoint serving POST /api/run-agent. The default endpoint, https://autoplans.dev, does not currently serve that route, so those surfaces fail until you point the setting at a server that does.

Commands

Command	What it does
`Apify Autoplans: New Actor Agent Session`	Start the coding agent in a new session
`Apify Autoplans: Set API Key`	Store the key in VS Code's SecretStorage
`Apify Autoplans: Set Proxy Backend Endpoint`	Point the extension at a backend
`Apify Autoplans: Show Status`	Show whether a key is set, the endpoint and the version
`Apify Autoplans: Run Agent with Browser Use`	Drive the local browser against a prompt
`Apify Autoplans: Create Apify Scraper`	Analyse a site and write Actor code to the output channel
`Apify Autoplans: Learn from Website`	Analyse a site and return findings

Create Apify Scraper writes the generated code to the Apify Autoplans output channel. It does not write files into the workspace.

Settings

Setting	Default	What it is
`apifyAutoplans.proxyEndpoint`	`https://autoplans.dev`	Backend the browser agent's analysis is sent to
`apifyAutoplans.agentEndpoint`	`https://autoplans.dev/api/v1/mcp`	Endpoint the Actor Agent signs in against
`apifyAutoplans.agentOpenIn`	`window`	Where Actor Agent sessions open
`apifyAutoplans.agentRuntimePath`	(empty)	Path to the agent runtime, if not the npm package
`apifyAutoplans.enableDebugLogs`	`false`	Verbose logging in the output channel

Privacy & security

The API key is stored in VS Code's SecretStorage. The browser and the Actor Agent runtime both run locally. Page content gathered by the browser agent is sent to the configured proxyEndpoint for analysis.

Support

MIT licensed — see LICENSE.