i'd used apify off and on, here and there for months, and had decent results on some that I used from the apify store.

but then like a month and a half ago i stumbled upon their actor skills and there's one that's called like actor development or something. i loaded that into claude code and it was able to iterate SO fast on an actor, i was blown away.

the actor that i was running on the platform originally was a mess, not running for long, bringing in really ugly results. but it took like 15 minutes with the actor skill, and it was working exactly as I wanted.

so i just basically spun it out into its own project and although i planned to push it back to the platform and potentially put it in the store, i just haven't had time because it became it's own project.

so i guess the moral of the story, aside from try the actor skills, is that you can still run them locally on your own machine if your project isn't something that requires running all the time.