feat: new course kick off: Scraping with Apify and AI

[honzajavorek]

Puts #2174 into action.

Course structure

• The aim is to provide basic course intro and structure which we can further develop. Most of the stuff is TBD, this is really just a scaffolding.
• All the pages are unlisted, so we can do continuous deployment, but it's all hidden from the visitors.
• I re-numbered the sections in academy/platform so that the numbers make some sense after @TC-MO has previously nuked or moved most of the other content.
• I welcome feedback on where the course is in the academy, the name of the course, the names of the lessons…

First lesson

• I added the first lesson about chatting with AI and setting up an Actor. I welcome feedback on the tone of the lesson, handling of the level of experience of the audience, and the content of the lesson in general.

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Roasting time! 🍖 @tomnosek @patrikbraborec I guess I won't ask you for a review under each and every PR of the new course, but I think we should do this for the kick off to sync expectations. We had some initial discussions, then I've made a few educated guesses and decisions on how to approach this, and in the end I thought it's best if I just create the first lesson right away and let's see what you think about it.

The lesson is also a result of a few dead ends I had the "pleasure" to already explore 😅 I tried to design the lesson for people who are not familiar with coding, but can do basic work on the computer including running commands in the terminal. We could go lower, but then I'd be explaining the terminal itself, or how to copy and paste things, and I don't know if that's useful for this kind of content.

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Note

Low Risk
Low risk: documentation-only changes (new unlisted course pages plus sidebar reordering) with no product code or runtime behavior impact.

Overview
Introduces a new unlisted academy course, Scraping with Apify and AI, including a course landing page plus six lesson pages; lesson 1 is fully drafted (walkthrough using ChatGPT + Apify CLI to create a simple Shopify price scraper), while lessons 2–6 are placeholders marked under construction.

Reorders academy/platform navigation by adjusting multiple sidebar_position values, and updates the docs vocabulary allowlist to include crawlee.dev for linting/spellcheck.

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[tomnosek]

I think that the first article should be about just asking AI to create an Actor and then copy/paste it into the built-in Web IDE. That's the quickest way to get somewhere. If I open the course, the first heading is "Install Node.js", the second heading is "Install Apify CLI" - I'm already like "too complicated, I'm outta here". The current first article could be the next step.

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[honzajavorek]

@tomnosek I agree starting with "install Node.js" isn't ideal and I'm aware of it. I didn't start with what you suggest, because:

• I didn't realize "copy/paste it into the built-in Web IDE" could be a way. I know you mentioned it during our calls, but it slipped through my notes and it didn't pop up in my head on its own – I don't use the Web IDE myself and I basically forgot it exists.
• I already explored several options on how to start with "just asking AI to create an Actor" and it's actually harder than it seems, because without additional context the basic AI chat, moreover the free one, struggles to create Actors properly. It started working only with the template code as an input. The prompts in docs don't help much, as they are tailored towards agentic IDEs with the project set up locally.

I think it's worth finding the easiest way to start, so I'll spend some time exploring if we could really start with the Web IDE and plain ChatGPT, and what would the workflow could be.

The capabilities of ChatGPT are limited and it's a bit of struggle, but I think it's a really important limitation as most people know only ChatGPT. It really should be the starting point. We pick them up where they already are and bring them to more advanced patterns. Hopefully I can find a way.

[tomnosek]

@honzajavorek I agree with starting with ChatGPT - at least for now, it's the intro to AI/LLM for a broader audience. Maybe it'll be Gemini in the future, but I'm happy with your choice.

What worked well for me in the past was to literally say in the message that I'm going to be using Apify Console to run it with Web IDE for the code and that this is the link to the template to use and this is the link to the docs to use.

[honzajavorek]

@szaganek I think the material is ready for a re-review. The PR is getting big, so this is a summary of my changes after today:

• c31cd95 contains your own suggested edits
• a64943a fixing one heading everywhere
• 0da7fd5 + 2bf5e45 are my edits to the order of sections, some flow, etc. (the first commit is my raw work, the second is AI-assisted polishing)
• I also updated the PR so that it is on top of current master branch of the repository.

Regarding this one:

There's one more thing on my mind, have you considered using imperative from time to time (Navigate to X vs. We'll navigate to X or Click X vs. We'll click X) to make the content flow a little better, make it sound more instructional, and avoid future tense when it's not really necessary?

My original aim with the tone of the courses was to be 'we do this and that', so that it has this warm 'curious collective activity' feel, rather than 'teacher imperatively instructs a student'. After a few courses written like this I can definitely see the downside you mention, the we'll and let's get repetitive fast. When starting this particular course, I didn't proactively open this can of worms… wills…? and just defaulted to consistency with the rest.

[szaganek]

Just one tiny thing I missed previously and I think it's good to go.

Re: can of worms (wills), I think it's okay start mixing in the imperative here and there, so that the content doesn't sound so repetetive as you noticed yourself. I'm not saying to use it absolutely everywhere, because we'll just rebrand the current problem :D Let's try to find some balance.

Adding to that, we'll have one more can of worms to tackle, and that's screenshots. But let's sync on that separetely.

[honzajavorek]

Thanks! Regarding screenshots, I'm all for having a shared guidebook on how to keep them consistent across the docs.

• In the past @TC-MO already suggested I should make them in light mode, so I'm sticking to that.
• We had discussions about their size, which resulted in me creating them in WebP – which will soon be enforced by a linter as a policy: chore: add images lint #2534
• In the past I remember @mnmkng has been using a tool to make the screenshots, but I still didn't pay for it, because I'm a caveman, and I stick to built-in macOS screenshot tools 😂

If I have a guidebook, I'll stick to what's in it when creating new ones. I'm just terrified about re-doing all the old ones. So let's have the sync sooner than later, I guess 😅

[TC-MO]

Good flagging, thanks! @szaganek has been driving this (kudos!).

Quick context:

• The direction is to swap noisy PNG captures for Figma-redrawn SVGs. Real Console screenshots show run metadata, CPU charts, and logs that go stale every release. The Figma versions show the same UI without any of that real data. This mostly applies to our own UI. External tool screenshots (ChatGPT, Web IDE, agentic IDEs) are a different conversation since we don't own those UIs.
• Open question on my end: how much of this applies to Courses at all? The strategy is shaped by two goals at once. We want to position docs for agent-consumption (prose as the source of truth, since agents only see text via MCP, llms.txt, and .md endpoints) and tighten human-consumption (visuals as a focused channel, not a crutch). Courses have a different consumption pattern than reference docs, so I'm not sure the same calculus fits. What probably does apply across the board: light mode, highlight color, and the rule-of-thumb of asking whether a given screenshot is actually earning its place. That can, and does, live in CONTRIBUTING for everyone.

[honzajavorek]

I don't think (new) courses show much of Apify. This one is a bit special, because it's for non-dev people and should be very beginner friendly, so there's some clicking etc., at least in the beginning 1-2 lessons, before we teach them better.