Can I vibecode GetXAPI?

What you build

A Python CLI that pulls tweets and profiles for a shortlist of handles into SQLite on a cron, using an X account you are willing to lose.

what you need

• a throwaway X account
• patience for re-login breakage

The DIY version works until X notices; the product is the part that keeps working after.

The prompt

A weekend with a coding agent. The gaps that stay are right below, under “what you lose”.

Build me a personal Twitter/X archive tool in Python.

- Use twscrape (pip) for all X access; I will add one or two throwaway
  accounts with `twscrape add_accounts` myself. Never use my real account.
- watchlist.txt holds up to 10 handles, one per line.
- An hourly cron entry point `python fetch.py`: for each handle, pull new
  tweets since the last stored id and upsert into SQLite (tweets: id, handle,
  text, created_at, like_count, retweet_count, is_reply, is_quote).
- Be gentle: shuffle handle order, sleep 5-15s between handles, and back off
  for an hour on repeated failures instead of hammering.
- `python export.py <handle>` writes that handle's archive to JSON and CSV.
- A localhost dashboard (Flask, one page): newest tweets across all handles,
  a per-handle sparkline of tweets per day, and a search box over a SQLite
  full-text index.
- Local only: no cloud, no accounts beyond the burners, no telemetry;
  session data stays in twscrape's own store.
- README: setup, the cron line, and a blunt warning that scraping X breaks
  routinely and burner accounts get flagged; when fetch.py starts failing,
  re-login or swap accounts.
- Explicitly out of scope: posting, DMs, webhooks/streaming, more than ~10
  handles, and anything commercial.

What you lose

• reliability: every X change is your outage until you patch it
• account safety: automation flags and burns the login it runs on
• write actions: posting and DMs from a scraper risk real bans
• real-time push: no webhooks, you poll and you lag
• scale: a few handles works, thousands is a different sport

Why people still pay

X retired meaningful free API access and priced the official tiers for enterprises, so everyone else either scrapes or pays someone to keep scraping working. The subscription is not the endpoints, it is the ops: absorbing every anti-bot change, keeping sessions alive, and answering for uptime while you build your actual product.

moat: Infrastructure scale Execution quality what a moat is

anti-bot arms race / maintained access infra

Who has already built it

Starting from here is still vibecoding: the prompt is for when you want it exactly your way.

• twscrape (opens in a new tab) — account-based X scraper, the standard DIY starting point
• twitter-scraper (opens in a new tab) — TypeScript X scraper, no official API

Do you agree?