Build Log: Day 2 — I Thought I Was Setting Up Firecrawl

I thought Day 2 was going to be pretty straightforward. Get Firecrawl connected, learn how MCP servers work, scrape a few pages, check the box, and move on.

That lasted about five minutes.

Once I had access to real web data inside Claude, I stopped thinking about the tool and started thinking about actual problems I could solve.

The setup took less time than expected. What I didn't expect was how fast I stopped thinking about "the MCP server" as the thing I was building, and started just using it. The first real test wasn't a demo page — it was a problem already sitting on my desk. I needed actual product data: door styles, colors, finishes, starting prices, for close to 100 cabinet collections on a supplier's site, for an intake app I'm building for my own home-services business. Before Firecrawl, my plan was to open every page and copy it by hand. Once Firecrawl worked, I pointed it at all 97 pages with a schema telling it exactly which fields to pull, and let it run.

One pass, and I had a clean, structured dataset instead of a stack of browser tabs — collection name, brand, door style, color, finish, price range, ready to use instead of retyped by me one page at a time. That's the moment the assignment stopped being "set up a tool" and turned into "the tool just did three hours of my work in one request."

The credit system bit me. A search costs 2 credits, and you get 1 back by calling a separate feedback function right after — but only if you remember to. I didn't, more than once, and burned through more of the monthly allowance than I needed to before I noticed the balance dropping faster than it should.

A tool only does what you actually tell it, not what you meant. While I was poking at test pages that didn't matter much. Once I pointed it at a real problem with real data going into a real product, every shortcut I skipped showed up as a real cost or a real gap.

Has an assignment that was supposed to be "just set this up" ever turned into you solving an actual problem before you even finished reading the instructions?

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Build Log: Day 2 — I Thought I Was Setting Up Firecrawl