🧩 Runtime Snapshots #16 — The Three Architectures of Browser Agents

Every team building an AI agent for the browser is making one architectural choice — whether they realize it or not. They're choosing how the LLM perceives the page. That choice cascades into everything else: cost per action, reliability on real-world apps, what gets banned by anti-bot systems, what kinds of tasks are even feasible. The choice currently breaks down into three approaches. They're often discussed as if they're competing technologies. They aren't. They operate at different abstract