My Week with AI

My Week with AI — week ending 25 September 2026

Academic PDF download with permission blocker

Tuesday 22 September, 8:05am · Claude Code (mini) · Sonnet 5

Prompt:

You are downloading open-access academic PDFs. For EACH of the following URLs, in order: navigate to the URL in a new tab, wait up to 15 seconds for any 'Just a moment' / Cloudflare check to clear, and if a PDF is displayed in the browser, trigger the download (use the PDF viewer's download button, or the browser's download action) so the file lands in ~/Downloads. Do NOT sign in anywhere, do NOT type credentials, do NOT click anything other than a download/save button. After all URLs, reply with one line per URL: URL | displayed PDF yes/no | download triggered yes/no.
1. https://www.pnas.org/doi/pdf/10.1073/pnas.2422633122?download=true
2. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdfdirect/10.11 […]

What I was trying to achieve: I wanted to batch download open-access academic papers from multiple publisher sites.

What happened: I discovered that multiple academic publishers block Chrome extension-based automation due to per-site permission requirements, preventing downloads without manual intervention.

Tags: automation, constraints, troubleshooting, browser

Reflection: There’s always a workaround… until there isn’t. And then there’s a new workaround.