Resource safety:

• Run these commands one at a time. Do not parallelize compare:static*, compare:tokens*, or browser-backed tests.
• compare:static* may launch agent-browser and Chromium. Check for existing browser work before starting, and confirm processes are cleaned up afterward.
• Use pnpm readiness:audit before claiming the agent-readiness objective is complete. It checks that the single-worker validation rules, fixture gate, comparison gate, process checker, and README/docs split are still wired in.
• Use pnpm readiness:real-page-smoke for the smallest real-page check. It fetches https://example.com with --agent-brief and does not launch Puppeteer or agent-browser.
• Use pnpm readiness:agent-browser-smoke for the smallest agent-browser comparison set. It checks https://example.com and https://books.toscrape.com/, https://news.ycombinator.com, and https://www.gov.uk/foreign-travel-advice; run pnpm check:processes before and after it.
• Use pnpm readiness:agent-browser-text-heavy-smoke only when checking the text-heavy document policy. It checks Korean Wikipedia separately from the main smoke because strict StaticText overlap is tracked apart from structural content readiness.
• Use pnpm check:processes before and after browser-backed comparison runs.
• If several target sets are needed, run them sequentially and save each output separately.

pnpm compare:sample
pnpm compare:static:fixtures
pnpm compare:static:fixtures:gate
pnpm readiness:audit
pnpm readiness:real-page-smoke
pnpm readiness:agent-browser-smoke
pnpm readiness:agent-browser-text-heavy-smoke
pnpm check:processes
pnpm compare:static https://example.com https://news.ycombinator.com
pnpm compare:tokens https://example.com https://news.ycombinator.com
pnpm compare:static:agent
pnpm compare:static:korea-social
pnpm compare:tokens:korea-social
pnpm compare:static:china-japan
pnpm compare:tokens:china-japan
pnpm compare:gate /tmp/ax-grep-agent.json /tmp/ax-grep-tokens.json

The comparison scripts compare ax-grep output with agent-browser snapshot output and score the CLI --agent summary. The score covers agent, pageCheck, searchResults, structured evidence, readability, source link quality, verification status, recommended actions, and next steps.

Token comparisons estimate prompt cost for compact tree text and agent JSON payloads. See comparison-baseline.md for the current baseline run.

Search, social, challenge, and volatile targets may be diagnostic-only and excluded from gate averages. Check each run's included and excluded counts before treating an average as release-gating coverage.

compare:static:fixtures:gate is the non-browser smoke gate: it uses synthetic HTML fixtures only, so it should not fetch remote pages or launch agent-browser. Use compare:static:fixtures when you need the JSON report.

readiness:real-page-smoke is the smallest remote-page gate. It checks that --agent-brief can use fetched HTML on https://example.com without requesting browser capture.

readiness:agent-browser-smoke is the smallest browser-backed comparison gate. It runs pnpm compare for https://example.com and https://books.toscrape.com/, https://news.ycombinator.com, and https://www.gov.uk/foreign-travel-advice, requires agent-browser snapshots, and enforces per-target overlap/readiness floors. Treat it like other browser-backed work: one command at a time, with process checks before and after.

readiness:agent-browser-text-heavy-smoke is a separate browser-backed comparison for text-heavy document pages. It requires Korean Wikipedia to keep usable action/navigation/structural-content recall while still reporting strict text recall separately.

compare:gate checks saved JSON output from compare:static* and compare:tokens*. Static gates require executor, handoff, browser-advantage, search/page decision, and action-list scores to stay near 1.0 with no gate-included challenge, shell, or over-collected classifications. Token gates require the compact agent payload average to stay cheaper than the browser reference after thin browser snapshots are excluded.

Current suites include:

• static HTML vs browser snapshots
• fixture-only agent readiness smoke checks
• agent executor regression targets for averageAgentExecutorScore
• fixture-backed search open, search refine, and browser HTML retry recovery
• CLI agent summary scoring for pageCheck, sources, readability, and actions
• token-cost comparison for compact tree prompts and agent JSON prompts
• Korean forum/search/social targets
• Chinese and Japanese wiki/news/forum/search targets
• challenge and volatile-page diagnostics