The guide· 5 min read· Written for beginners
Framework — the thinking.
Before any of this: if the tool you want to automate has a proper way in built for software — an API, a side door for computers instead of fingers — use that. It's faster, and it doesn't break the day someone moves a button. Browser automation is what you reach for when there's no side door. That's the whole decision.
Everything here then follows one rule: an honest gap beats a confident guess.
A report that's confidently wrong is worse than no report, because you'll act on it. So each of these refuses to guess. If it can't see something, it says so. If it isn't sure whether something worked, it says it didn't. That sounds cautious. It's the opposite — it's what makes the answers worth anything.
Three jobs, and how to tell which one you want:
- Read something behind your login — The Dashboard Check. Borrows the browser you're already signed into.
- Know if something breaks while you're asleep — The Form Watchdog. Runs on a schedule, speaks up only when there's bad news.
- See your own site as a stranger does — The Cold Walk. A browser with no memory of you.
- Not think about which — Site Watch, the skill. Ask in plain English and it picks.
Copy & Customize — pick one and run it.
Every prompt has [BRACKETS] in it. Swap those for your own details, paste it in, and that's the whole customisation.
Start with The Dashboard Check. It's the only one with nothing to install, and Google publishes a free demo Analytics account you can practise on — real dashboard, real numbers, nothing of yours at risk. Point the prompt at that until you trust it, then swap in your own.
Where each one goes:
- The Dashboard Check — the Claude app, with the Chrome connector switched on. Needs a paid plan.
- The Form Watchdog — Claude Code. It sets itself up. Run it once on a working form, then break it on purpose before you trust it.
- The Cold Walk — Claude Code. It sets itself up. Run it on your homepage and read what it found without arguing.
- Site Watch — install the skill once, then just say what you want: "cold walk my site", "is my signup form still working", "check my dashboard". If you're vague, it asks rather than guessing.
Results — what good looks like.
A good Dashboard Check is three lines. Something like: Sessions 30k, last 7 days. Couldn't tell up or down from this screen. Nothing needs doing. Notice what it didn't do — it didn't guess the direction.
A good Watchdog is silence. You should never hear from it. When you do, something is actually wrong.
A good Cold Walk is uncomfortable. Up to five problems, worst first, each with the smallest fix. Your instinct will be to explain why each one isn't really a problem. That instinct is the reason you needed the tool.
Then there are the four traps. Each one is a way these jobs can look like they worked while telling you nothing, and each one cost something to find.
- An empty box is not a zero. Dashboards draw the page first and fill the numbers in a second later. Ask too early and you get a blank — which reads exactly like a zero. "Sessions: 0 this week" is worse than no report at all.
- Your form can say "thanks" while nobody gets added. While testing, a signup that had failed still showed the word "confirm" on the page, because the box underneath was labelled Confirm Password. Anything hunting for reassuring words would have called that a healthy form every single morning. So the Watchdog ignores words: did the form go away, and did an error appear.
- The forgetful browser remembers. There's a setting that's meant to make the browser forget you, and I assumed it had. I checked — sitting there was a tracking cookie from an earlier visit with a counter reading session number two. So the prompt now proves the browser is empty before it walks. It checks three things, and on the run that caught this, only one of the three spotted it.
- Testing the schedule can kill the schedule. Once yours runs daily, leave it alone. I forced one extra run to check it worked, and that replaced the daily schedule instead of adding to it, then switched itself off when it finished. A monitor that looks healthy in the list and never runs again is the exact failure these jobs exist to catch.
The one-minute version: use the proper way in if the tool has one. Start with a job that only looks at things, and build the ones that change things once you trust it. Check the end of the job, not the middle. And anything that claims it forgot you — check.
