I Taught My AI Agent To Post Instagram Reels By Hijacking Chrome Cookies

I spent eight hours yesterday trying to get my AI agent to post a single Instagram Reel without a human in the loop. Eight hours. For one Reel. The file was sitting on disk, encoded, captioned, thumbnail picked. It just needed to end up in front of humans. Here is what it took. Why the obvious path is a trap If you Google "post to Instagram programmatically" you get three suggestions, in this order: Meta Graph API (the official one) instagrapi (the reverse-engineered mobile one) Playwright browser automation (the nuclear option) I tried all three.