Is an editable artifact a better test of visual understanding than a screenshot?

A research team at the company I work for recently ran a benchmark where coding agents were given an image of a scientific flow diagram and asked to reconstruct it as a PowerPoint slide using only native, editable objects. What I found interesting wasn’t really the PowerPoint part. It was the idea that the output format itself could reveal what an agent actually understood. A rendered image can look roughly correct while hiding structural mistakes. A connector may point to the wrong node. Two objects may only appear grouped. The agent could even reproduce the pixels without recovering any of the underlying structure. An editable artifact makes those shortcuts harder. Every box, label, connector, and layer becomes part of an inspectable object graph. The result doesn’t just show what the agent produced — it records how the agent decomposed the visual input. That seems potentially useful beyond slides: HTML instead of website screenshots, editable diagrams instead of flat images, CAD geometry instead of renders, or formulas and cell relationships instead of spreadsheet previews. If an agent produces something that looks correct but has the wrong underlying structure, has it actually solved the task? And what other agent tasks could benefit from requiring structured, editable outputs?