A few weeks ago, a TikTok dataset published on Hugging Face caught my eye: it contained metadata of 5.6B videos from the platform. That’s a huge dataset, and the data collection immediately appeared to me to be the most interesting part. Using a browser or an emulator to do so would have been too expensive. In fact, the write-up from DataSocial explained the general shape of the approach: it was completely headless, with no emulators in the loop. I was able to read it before it disappeared (thanks Web Archive for the snapshot) and was intrigued by replicating it, but it didn’t reveal the ingredients of the secret sauce. They were put behind a paywall costing 1699 USD. Which, I mean, is totally fine, but then I asked myself: “I have this cool reverse engineering setup, made by Hermes Agent, Reverse Engineer Anything repo and GLM 5.3, maybe I can find the answers by myself”.