Pick the right Steel interface for the job: REST quick actions for stateless one-offs, a CDP websocket via Playwright or Puppeteer for long-running automation. Mixing them up is the classic mistake - polling REST for a 10-minute workflow, or holding a session open for a single screenshot. And if you need the whole thing inside your own VPC, the self-hosted steel-browser build is the same API surface under Apache-2.0.

Context: Steel API notes: the Cloud REST API at api.steel.dev/v1 launches and manages cloud browser sessions and runs stateless quick actions (scrape, screenshot, pdf, search), while long-running automation connects to a per-session Chrome DevTools Protocol websocket driven with Playwright, Puppeteer, or Selenium. The same surface ships self-hosted as steel-browser under Apache-2.0.

## Matched source
Source: Published skill
Original query: "REST quick actions for one-offs, CDP websockets for long automations"
Key terms: actions, automations, long, offs, quick, rest, websockets