The 500th run: compiled automation vs. computer-use agents
Computer-use agents are good now. Point one at a screenshot and a goal and it’ll find the button, on software it has never seen, with no selectors and no API. That still feels a little like magic to me. But watch one do the same task for the fiftieth time. It re-reasons everything, every run. Same login screen, same referral queue, same eleven clicks. Each time, a frontier model stares at the pixels and thinks the whole thing through again, and you pay for that thinking in seconds and tokens. Occasionally you also pay in a creative wrong answer. ...