# Huawei

> Drove research into whether WebMCP helps browser agents and how they should use it, proposing alternatives, implementing them and analyzing experiments.

Software engineering co-op, May-August 2026.

I spent four months at Huawei researching whether WebMCP is a worthwhile standard for browser agents, and how an agent should be built to use it. I drove the experimental work, from proposing questions and approaches to implementing them and working through the results.

[WebMCP](https://developer.chrome.com/blog/webmcp-epp) lets a website expose actions an agent can call through its forms and JavaScript. Those actions can [depend on the page the agent is on](https://developer.chrome.com/docs/ai/webmcp/best-practices#create_a_tool_strategy).

Imagine an issue tracker on something like GitHub: the issues page could offer tools for creating and managing issues, while the pull requests page offers a different set. The tools don't all have to be available at once.

I worked on both: what capabilities a page should expose, and how an agent should discover and use them. I built tools for pages on some sites we chose and adapted open-source agents to compare methods of allowing the agents to interact with the tools.

When a comparison finished, I went through the runs: where were the gains? Where were the regressions? What was the agent doing differently? I looked at success and efficiency, and used what I found to propose the next experiments.

I also built benchmark queues so the fleet of workstations we had would stay busy overnight, served local models, and tracked down browser, session and model-serving failures when runs stopped.

I'm not personally betting that tools will replace page observation. My expectation is that small local models will get extremely good at difficult computer-use tasks. I think some of the work I did will become outdated quickly. I learned a lot doing it anyway.

In the meantime, WebMCP may be a good way to make web agents usable for people, for cheap and fast. I see it as an interim approach. Let's make products that users can enjoy now. That's the idea.

Source: https://ariobarin.com/huawei