What Is the Real Bottleneck for AI Agents
interlap · reddit · 2026-07-15
While developing a mobile agent, the author spent significant time optimizing invisible user elements: speeding up actions, improving UI tree extraction accuracy, handling obscured buttons, and correcting clickable areas of partially visible elements, aiming to make the device interaction layer as deterministic as possible.
However, they began questioning if these optimizations are the actual bottleneck:
- The model itself takes seconds to make a decision;
- Sometimes it makes the wrong choice;
- Sometimes it can self-recover just by looking at screenshots.
This raises the question: does saving 100ms on a tool call or saving tokens actually improve the experience? Or do these optimizations only matter when interaction volume scales from a single attempt to thousands? The author is seeking insights from others in the agent space on how they prioritize.
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