The wrapper is doing the work

Five papers landed on my desk this week and every one of them is about the same thing. Not the model. The layer you built around it. That layer is the part most of us treat as plumbing. It's the code that decides what the agent looks at, what it's allowed to run, and what goes in the prompt. Turns out it's doing more of the work than the model choice you spent a fortnight agonising over, and more of the damage too. Give it the file, not a picture of the file The pick is StateAct, and the idea is almost annoyingly simple. Computer-use agents are usually improved by making them better at reading screenshots. But a screenshot is a lossy picture of what the program actually holds. A live formula and a number typed over the top render identical pixels. A saved file and an unsaved buffer look the same. The agent cannot tell them apart because the information isn't in the image. So they gave the main agent code instead. It reads and edits the real artifacts, and hands off to a…