Section 1 — Hook + Ethics framing (~430 words)

Most automation projects in regulated industries hit the same wall

eventually: a CAPTCHA on an internal portal blocks the very automation

the team is trying to build.

In our case, the ops team needed to interact with one of our company's

internal portals dozens of times per day. The portal — built by an

internal team, used only by employees — gates access with a 6-digit

numeric CAPTCHA on every login. Reasonable security choice for the

original threat model. Not so reasonable for the team that needs to

script repetitive workflows on top of it.

The right fix would have been to add a service-account API to the

portal team's backlog.…