Cutting Through the Noise: How Programmatic Pruning Turns Web Agents into Real Operators
Clicking the right button should not be an intelligence test. For humans, a webpage is usually manageable. We scan the visible screen, ignore the footer, dismiss the newsletter trap, and find the search box without treating every hidden <div> as a philosophical object. Web agents are less lucky. They see a modern page as a swollen mixture of visible text, invisible attributes, nested containers, event handlers, accessibility metadata, layout debris, cookie banners, product cards, promotional links, and enough frontend residue to make “just use the DOM” sound like a mild punishment. ...