Hill-Climbing Skills: Improve Agents Without Changing the Model — Shubhankar Srivastava, Browserbase
Browser agent reliability is an engineering problem solvable without changing the underlying model
“We view reliability primarily as an engineering problem.”
Shubhankar Srivastava from Browserbase argues that the core challenge in production browser agents—freezing, CAPTCHA failures, task incompletion—is fundamentally an engineering problem, not a model capability problem. The talk frames agent improvement as 'hill climbing skills': iterating on the tools and skills you give an agent rather than swapping models. This is a useful practitioner signal for teams hitting reliability ceilings with their current agents.