Incident Summary — PFR Data Extraction Task (Cowork Session)

Date: 2026-06-22 Account: granthansell@gmail.com Reported cost impact: ~$75 in usage credits, per user report

What was requested

Extract the full stats tables (every row, no filtering/deduping) from 28 Pro-Football-Reference pages into CSV files:

What went wrong

  1. The initial approach used the web_fetch tool to retrieve each page. This tool has an undocumented (to the assistant) hard truncation cap of approximately 85,500 characters per fetch — confirmed by directly re-fetching the same URL and observing an identical cutoff. For any year where the full stats table exceeded that size (most years, since PFR tables include every roster player who recorded any stat, including zero-attempt linemen, kickers, etc., not just regulars), the fetch silently returned an incomplete table cut off mid-row, with no error indicating data was missing.
  2. To parallelize the work, 4 subagents were dispatched to fetch and convert batches of pages using this same flawed web_fetch approach. 3 of the 4 subagents hit a “session limit” message before completing and returned no usable final output, despite having consumed tool-call budget (resources/credits) in the process.
  3. This resulted in: 2 entirely missing files, 1 broken/truncated-mid-run file, and at least 5 more files that were silently incomplete (cut off partway through the table) — all without any error surfaced to the user at the time.
  4. The truncation root cause was only identified after this spend had already occurred, via a side-by-side comparison against a browser-rendered fetch (Claude_in_Chrome get_page_text), which retrieved the complete table with no truncation.

Resolution attempted

A corrected approach (browser-based fetch + a deterministic parsing script) was built and verified against one page (1994 rushing — 481 rows, matching the live page exactly, including zero-stat players and traded-player split rows). The user opted to stop the project at that point rather than incur further cost completing the remaining 27 pages.

Ask

Review of usage credits charged during this session for the repeated/incomplete web_fetch-based extraction attempts described above, given the failure was caused by an undocumented tool limitation rather than by the task being infeasible or by user error.

Supporting artifact

rushing_1994.csv in this same folder — the one file successfully completed and verified, included as evidence the underlying task was achievable and that the cost was attributable to the tooling failure described above, not the task itself.