Research agents have a bad habit that will feel familiar to anyone who has watched a junior analyst “verify one more source” for three hours. They search. They visit. They re-search. They validate the thing they already validated. Then, because the context window is now full of debris, they occasionally forget the actual question. A triumph of diligence, perhaps. A triumph of intelligence, less obviously. ...
Click. That is where most web-agent demos become either impressive or mildly tragic. The model reads the instruction, understands the goal, produces a confident plan, and then clicks the wrong thing. Or it clicks the right thing before a modal appears. Or it scrolls, forgets why it scrolled, repeats an action, and quietly turns a three-step workflow into interpretive dance. ...
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. ...
TL;DR for operators A recent arXiv paper on LLM-based agents for drug-asset due diligence shows something more useful than “AI does research now.” It shows a practical operating pattern: convert past expert memos into a measurable benchmark, send a persistent web-search agent to maximise competitor recall, then pass candidates through a stricter validator before analysts see them.1 ...
TL;DR for operators A web agent that looks impressive in a demo may still fail when asked to complete ordinary live tasks across messy websites. That is the central finding of An Illusion of Progress? Assessing the Current State of Web Agents, which introduces Online-Mind2Web, a benchmark of 300 realistic tasks across 136 websites.1 ...