The article does say that AI agents could go through the web interface, but it's not clear if Doordash is counting those orders as AI orders or not. I agree, there's no real information here.
I would not trust the AI to order food off of these websites for me because the labeled data itself is pretty much shit. Lots of dishes are unlabeled, have really bad pictures or no pictures at all, and the worse is the ones that have AI generated descriptions which are often wrong or not helpful. I'm totally fine with letting it just use my saved credit cards and delivery address (I assume the AI doesn't see them) but I can't trust it to order the food I actually want.
doordash is regularly audited for PCI, they almost certainly store raw CC#s and follow modern tokenization standards. The best the agent would see is the name you stored for the card if you have multiple cards it can pick from in the account.
You can pull the PCI compliance documentation from their trust center if you are a partner
https://trust.doordash.com/
For addresses, it's a almost certain the agent would see those since those are visible in the UI when ordering and required for selecting a destination for the order
It's plausible, but also, AI systems have a long history of being plugged in on the wrong side of security boundaries.
Remember when you were able to take over any Instagram account by asking the helpful support AI to send a password reset to an email address of your choice?
>Remember when you were able to take over any Instagram account by asking the helpful support AI to send a password reset to an email address of your choice?
Wow, first I've heard of that. Damages must have been immense for that level of incompetence occasioning financial harm. Or do those laws only apply if you can't hire very expensive lawyers to blame a computer?
> AI, I asked you to check the docs for the latest version of the API, yet you didn't. Why?
> You are completely right! That was my miss, I have no excuse. I've now looked at the docs and implemented it.
Now imagine how triggered you'd be when the AI decides to get you a vegan burger because the chicken wrap is on the second page and it know you're a health conscious person.
It's better they don't because considering how Claude reacts when you give it a meaningless SSH login password for a local box, the moment it learns your CC# and CVV2 it will probably call your bank and cancel the card instead of ordering any food.
I have never ordered meat dishes, ever. Yet all of these food delivery apps suggest meat dishes for me
This has been my experience too, with Uber Eats. It recommends meat dishes, every. single. time even though I have never ordered a meat dish, even once. This is the absolute basic, minimum help a food recommendation algo should do, and it still doesn't. I wonder why. Maybe vegetarians are too small a percentage of customers for these apps to care?
DoorDash seems like a resource anti-optimization that would be made irrelevant by an AI agent managing one's meals. An unofficial HEB MCP [0]—that's cooking with gas!
Because the DoorDash app is so simple, delightful, intuitive?
Look, there's a lot of AI excitement and a lot of it is dumb. But if there's a number I can text "hey get me a pizza" and it re-orders the same pizza order I make every Friday night, I'm going to use it. Would I pay for it? As a standalone service? Obviously not.
But if I could delete half the apps on my phone with their horrid dark-pattern-filled interfaces and constant upsells, I'd love that. I'll happily delegate the interfacing to an agent.
And I'd 100% pay that agent to drop the ads and upsells when DoorDash tells it to pass them along.
Not to mention, searching for food joints is awful. If I want to find authentic Chinese or somewhere with real Bao, I'm going to have to trudge through a hundred pages of Google, Reddit, Yelp, online menus. 90% of the results are garbage and sponsored fast food slop or shadow kitchens.
If I could just ask a single sentence and get back pre-filtered, high-quality answers I would be stoked.
Is that true? Amazon reports massive growth in AI and voice commerce. While Echo users appear uncomfortable making big purchases, the segment who routinely use it for stuff like paper towels has been taking off.
I don't know many Echo owners, but the few that I know (n=2) used it to reorder stuff like paper towels.
> There are other signs that voice shopping has never taken off. Fewer than 25% of Amazon Echo owners have ever directly used their devices to make a purchase and fewer than 5% are repeat Alexa shoppers, according to a report last year from Consumer Intelligence Research Partners, which conducts consumer surveys (an Amazon spokesperson said the firm's data was inaccurate and the majority of customers who shop with Alexa are repeat shoppers). And in August 2018, The Information reported that Amazon’s own internal data showed that only 2% of Alexa users had made a purchase so far that year with their voices.
from Amazon Faces Moment of Truth on Alexa as ChatGPT Steals Its Thunder (2023) https://archive.is/2jzve
Worse than that. Some product manager thought that if they shipped a bunch of buttons that said "Tide" users would keep pressing them and Tide sales would skyrocket. Bet he got promoted for the idea too.
Something that is perhaps “underreported” is that a lot of AI solutions aren’t easier to do than just doing the thing.
My budget app, for example: It’s not easier for me to ask the AI bot “show me all my transactions from McDonald’s” than it is to click on the search bar/payee filter and type “McDonald’s.”
its a classical effect of having a hammer and recognising everything as a nail to whack. its pretty tricky to find a problem well suited to a tool like LLMs.
i programming stuff using LLM of which the resultant programs are deterministic and dont use LLMs or tokens is a better or easier approach to having gains. because the resulting program can be easier to use and doesnt cost a lot to run. Automations are a good target, or integratig libraries into other programs. tedious things u know well how to do but take time to do manually. then once done fix a problem or workflow that u need fixed by the solution yielded.
ive not seen 1 app that does calls to an LLM that i find useful, apart from harnesses that produce code (which is only recently becoming more appealing and might depend on how good and fast u can write code, at which im not the best nor the fastest.)
Recently laid off and not a big AI guy… but to illustrate your points:
Tailoring + proofing resumes to _manually_ apply to jobs is a great application of LLMs in my experience. But I wouldn’t want an AI to apply for jobs for me.
Funny thing about that. This time last year I was applying for jobs and kept my same old latex generated flawed human resume that I’ve been using 20 years or so.
Recruiters said it was standing out in the tech sector. Apparently AI likes to embellish way too much so you don’t trust it.
My wife has to submit a bunch of translated documents for procurement processes. Noone really reads those but they are a hard requirement. These are usually in DOCX or sometimes PDF with tables, product images etc. So I built her a little applet which (after clicking two buttons) sends the XML or PDF to an LLM in chunks and it spits back the same structure but with translated text. Of course there are edge cases where it doesn’t work perfectly but I’d say it works 95% of the time in a good enough quality to submit them. Saves her roughly 0.5-1 hour per job and much cheaper than other alternatives.
I’m doing something similar at work. Thousands of contracts, need to extract billing terms/logic. It’s scattered throughout each contract but has no summary, each contract can be hundreds of pages of non applicable legalese. The problem is, once I run it, can I trust the output without manual verification? How will I know if it skipped/missed something from a contract?
I would build a review dashboard that shows you the extracted data on one side and the visual snippet of the contract on the other. Quick to double check, and you still save time over opening the contract and searching for the right section and extracting it by hand or via OCR.
We have done something similar where it highlights the terms, basically each extracted term is linked to a specific highlight in the contract, and has them side by side like you said and you can jump around the contract by clicking on the extracted term. This helps when the agent needs HITL clarification on a term, as it gets you there quick and you can tell it more information to aid interpretation. But, if it missing something completely, I’d never know without reading the whole contract and validating every term I found the agent noticed. We’ve done some training sets and it does help and get better but the large variation of contracts means there’s little standardization.
I think we’re on path to just do random full review audits of maybe 10% to get a baseline confidence level and then just note it as a risk. Still a large manual task, we’ll probably outsource it.
I sat through an egregious demo of an AI add on for documentation. The flow was load doc (e.g. pdf) -> data filled into a specialized form view. To really wow me, they showed how I could type in the AI chat interface "change the title to 'abc'" and then it would make the change in the form view.
Why can I not just type the new name into the title field itself? Well, this is supposedly easier and in time the AI will learn and get the title right 100% of the time, so there won't be a need for me to edit it.
This is a major player in the industry, not some random kid.
> click on the search bar/payee filter and type “McDonald’s.”
Sure but you still have to open a dedicated app and that the search is just a string search.
I recently setup Muse (just seems to have the easiest out of the box connectors) to connect to all my accounts over Plaid. I can ask questions like:
* Review all recurring transactions.
* Show overview of last 12 months of spending by category.
* Review last months CC transactions.
* Estimate next months expenses.
And then in the same app, I automatically get personal financial and budget information that's actual useful. I can adjust the frequency and type of content just by updating the agent's goal.
I tried using YNAB. It felt so cumbersome compared to just asking AI for the info. I had to make a $300 fake expense to zero out an account minimium balance, I can't treat an investment account as a spending account (without some weird hacks).
Meanwhile, the same AI can cleanup my email inbox, watch my calendar, etc.
And I spent like ~2 days having Claude (over remote-control) create a Monte-Carlo simulation for retirement (including Tax calculations). Works great, I can read the code and make whatever changes I need.
The most friction I still encounter is the connector itself being too opinionated. Plaid's API tries to predict future expenses based on what's detected as a recurring charge; this of course was incorrect if similar Amazon.com charge amounts occur on similar days.
IMO purpose built apps are dead. A sandbox of tools that AI can use is far more flexible. Spending $20/month only needs to replace 3-4 other paid single purpose apps (or identify a single $20 recurring service to cancel) to be net-positive. Plus you don't have to configure it, just ask questions.
But that's you, a developer, who not only understands what they actually _need_ in order to have a good budgeting app and retirement planning app, for lack of a better word, but also are willing to spend the time setting it up, understand how it functions, and get it functional.
> And I spent like ~2 days having Claude (over remote-control) create a Monte-Carlo simulation for retirement (including Tax calculations). Works great, I can read the code and make whatever changes I need.
This is the biggest indicator of the divide between the AI-enthusiastic developer and the average person.
The average person isn’t going to want to sit down and spend two days to fine-tune code or a spreadsheet to accomplish this. They want an easy-to-navigate interface that is dead-simple and ready to go with the ability to get an answer done in five minutes or less. If they hit any snags in the first 30 seconds they’ll ditch it and move to the next solution. Why should they have to spend their time creating a duplicate solution when there are so many ready-to-go alternatives already out there? They want the path of least resistance.
True, but by "two days" I mean I asked Claude to do it from my phone while watching TV in the evening after work.
I think for people who can quickly understand and describe systems/code, AI is very magical. So many personal projects would be otherwise too tiring except for the 0.1% OSS developer personality that can spend 4+ hours a day working on stuff. Now AI means many projects can be implemented at the speed of thought.
Even still, the average person is going to have no idea how to prompt for such a thing. Do you think normal people know what monte-carlo simulations are?
I still use Monarch Money (similar to YNAB) but any time I have a real question I just download my data and ask Claude Code questions about my transactions. It works very well and it's not much effort.
There's a symmetry to things that happened in the mid-aughts as at that time there were some shifts in computing habits as well. For instance I knew a bunch of folks at the time who, instead of typing "www.website.com" into the URL bar, would open up google and type "www.website.com" and then click the top link.
I'd ask why and they'd just shrug, like *obviously* google is the front page for everything on the web.
Your anecdote is spot on and it feels like the people who are doing things that way are channeling similar energy.
Until they are a no-call no-show at 5am to go to the airport. Then you’re a Rideshare Co customer for life because there’s tracking and they will keep you in the loop.
I have never had my car service miss a pickup in 20 years. (Though I've slept through an alarm clock a couple of times.) But, then I don't really have reliable Uber or taxi service where I live.
That's how I feel about LLMs for programming, too. I've tried using them to write programs for me, but every time, when I finish up it winds up being a wash in terms of time+effort, or it took more time+effort than just writing it myself.
Yahoo Mail tried to add an "AI summary" to the top of all emails. The two line summary was worse than merely reading the two lines in the original email.
I'm not sure about what you use but my primary credit card (a major American bank) has an incredibly annoying interface for searching previous transactions.
Going to the grocery store is a similar example. For a while I was big on getting my groceries delivered. But then I started to realize that the amount of time it took to fill my cart was basically the same amount of time it took in the actual store, so I wasn’t really saving much time or convenience at all… plus I was missing out on some intrinsic joy of discovering and picking things myself.
Agreed, I also enjoy going through the line and making small talk with the cashier. Mostly because of remote work post-COVID. We have delivery this year with a newborn in the house, but now that they are almost 1 I don't think I am going to renew.
Up thread I just made a comment about how for some things I see talking verbally to an AI agent as the lowest friction solution, but I think I'll always be a physical grocery store browsing guy. I got groceries delivered a few times, years ago when my wife and I had covid at the same time. The experience was worse in every way for me than going down the aisles and putting things in my cart.
yeah, unless you’re doing with food what steve jobs did with sweaters i don’t see how someone can say they save time with groceries.
i can understand it with the “i’m gonna optimize everything to death crowd” probably eat the same thing every week. i couldn’t do it though, i get bored with the same food. its also why i can’t wear the same sweater every day lol.
An AI bot can jump straight to the thing you want, like "How much did I spend at McDonalds over the last year?"
It's worth considering whether you really want the full list of MCD transactions or is that just a step you're used to as a means to getting the answer you want.
I had a conversation the other day with some who told me that one very useful thing with AI now is that you can use it to find hotels in a city. My obvious reaction was that this has been a one or two button press thing on google maps for a very long time. They replied well yeah but now with AI you can tell it to only find rooms that don't go over a certain price.
I think a good chunk of people just do not ever try to understand what buttons do, ever, and it's maddening.
i was thinking about this the other day. so many things are just easier analog style.
i think we fell into a bit of mass cult.
obviously some are easier digital, but it absolutely is not always the case.
concert tickets was the one that hit me the other day. someone had given me physical tickets to a show. i just pulled them out of my pocket, they scanned them and … that was it. i hadn’t done an analog concert ticket since pre-covid times so i kinda forgot how easy it can be. no trying to remember which app i used or which password or searching through email… just pulled them out and that was it. and bonus points i have an actual ticket stub.
This is kind of a moot article because up until a month a go when DoorDash released their MCP, their bot detection was getting in the way of agentic ordering.
Some of these use case feel so imaginary that lot of people just don't get why would some other people do them. Like with food delivery I want to select specifically what I want and evaluate if the price is right. Same goes for ordering most stuff or deciding on vacation.
Maybe I could get train ticket from AI... Or order taxi. At least until it went wrong for the first time...
For me, the best use of AI is making bespoke software connecting systems and devices that have no business being connected but I find value in so I can have a unique interface for all my tech and hobbies. Not sure how that gets translated to the everyday man but it sure isn't "bring me food".
Agents are great for that middle ground between just doing it manually and creating an automation to do it. Which strikes me as yet another reason AI is so well suited to software development tasks, but hard to find useful applications outside of software development.
Agents are good for complex purchases with lots of hidden fees like hotels. Less useful for burgers, though I'd definitely try it for a large catering order.
When I have demoed the use of agents, I usually do it with an agent combining multiple applications' results. Something like: "We're having a family gathering at grandma's. Which of us can stop in at the drugstore to pick up her prescriptions on the way without adding a lot to our travel time?"
Agents are great at moderately complex combinations of data and apps. If I had to do this every day or every week even, it might be worth creating a script suited for a task like that using some automation system. Agents are great at providing a disposable saw when it doesn't make sense to stop and sharpen the saw.
I'm not a doorDash user, but they've been doing it long enough to have an app that's probably highly polished. There's not going to be a lot of upside to speaking or typing an English language command to get what you want. Trying to do that is a waste of a well designed app and the agent's token budget.
Maybe I am confused but what does the AI do in your example? Isn't that just an instance of Google Maps itself being useful? What does the agent even spend its time doing?
I should've provided more detail. The demo is really about a new app that uses AppFunctions to enable Google's agent to use data about a family group, and coordinate their actions mostly around taking care of an elderly family member.
The purpose of the demo is to show that you Instead it's better to enable agents to access relevant data and actions in a controlled way then it is to do app specific integrations with, for example, a map and navigation app in order to plan group gatherings. Instead it's better to enable agents to access relevant data in a controlled way, and to leave coordination across apps to the agent.
In fewer words: if working with another app could be valuable, leave it up to the agent instead of doing the integration at the app level.
Bots and tech are testing humanity's levels of desire for laziness and how much they are ready to pay for buying that laziness. Turns out that the desire is limitless. As someone said, the ultimate luxury is in having maximum laziness - not having to move, talk, think or use senses - the state of being a rock.
I mean even if I were an AI maximalist and very lazy, I think clicking “reorder” in the DoorDash app is infinitely easier than trying to tell Muse or whatever to order me me last DoorDash meal.
It's not a super repetitive problem (e.g.respond to 100s of messages) and human judgment is highly valued here (what am I hungry for?) and visuals are sometimes a factor.
The problem with AI assistants in general is that humans barely ever know what they want and the promise is that AI can intuit/predict what we want. It can't. People like to shop. It's easier to shop with our eyes than our ears. Personal assistants, as far as I can tell, have one use case and that is doing mundane chores like e-mail summaries. But to do that, you have to give them access to everything, so it becomes a transaction of privacy. And I think a lot of people are paranoid. Plus each one is a little token bonfire that is probably costing them money.
And I feel like the labs must all know this, so it makes me wonder why they're actually trying to push these assistants onto us. The answer I'm left with is training data — data theft. They'd all violate their privacy terms if it earned them an extra nickel.
Ya, when it comes to things like food I look at the pictures and my sense of taste, along with my emotional state at that moment. AI isn't a great fit here.
This has always been an ai use case that made no sense to me. The UI for ordering food is good, it's visual, it shows you the food you're getting and how much it costs. There's no reason for a chat interface to be an upgrade here. Chat interfaces only have an advantage when you need the nuance of language. It's good at the things where trying to build a UI for it would collapse into an incoherent jumble of visual language.
It's like Netflix- scrolling around looking at previews gives you all the dopamine, by the time you select a movie your brain just craves the phone and it's just background. You don't get doordash because you want to order a good, balanced, healthy meal. You do it because you want to scroll and find something that makes your brain tingle. By the time the food shows up cold 45min later, you're already on to the next thing.
While I'm sure there is a place for AI on the food prep side of things, I think it misses the point on the ordering side. While a lot of people want something different, they don't want it to be that different and it's just easier and faster to choose it themselves.
My hot take is capitalism can't deliver a "order one pepperoni pizza" product.
This is literally Pizza Hut flow right now:
- Go to website, look for deals page where pizza is $10 instead of $20.
- Click order, upsell on breadsticks, etc, etc.
- Check out, fees, delivery charge, tip take price from $10 to $20.
- On the receipt page, get SiriusXM offers.
Sellers are just too incentivized to upsell, and over-charge the less transparency there is.
Same for recipes/shopping carts. Can't trust sellers to optimize for minimum price/maximum value.
"you deserve a treat after $event, so I added cheesy garlic bread, Coca Cola, and a new Hershey's Overload dessert -- to undo these changes write a letter to me on a typewriter using headed 160gsm paper"
I think the proposition only works if you consistently order the same items from the same restaurant (and so on). It makes the order more predictable ("hey siri, order the same takeout I got from X chinese spot last week").
I don't need to see a menu, prices, or options for that unless I want to deviate from it.
The food delivery app I use occasionally has a reorder button for past orders. I've never used it but I can't imagine it's more of a hassle than typing something to a hallucinating chatbot
I suppose there is levels to all of these things. For somebody who uses apps to obtain most of their food, this is probably the next step.
Ordering off of DoorDash (or whatever equivalent app elsewhere) in general seems to be the worst possible way to acquire and eat food, in my personal opinion.
Everything on these apps is nutrition-zero junk, filled with salt, oil and sugar, charged at a premium. I ate it in the past, and nowadays I couldn't be paid to eat it. Self-cooked meals beat them in every way, including convenience.
I order all of my groceries using Muse. It's great at finding all the food items I like. But yeah, I wouldn't use it for Doordash, although I order takeaways anyway.
People coming up with these tech use cases live in a reality where price sensitivity isn't a thing.
"You can call an Uber with a voice command"
"You can ask alexa to buy you things"
"Your AI will order food for you"
Seem like magical ideas that will remove friction and increase sales. Except that regular people compare 13 different options to pick the cheapest one. No one wants to see food appear on their doorstep followed by a bill they cannot pay.
Couldn’t the agent do the comparison for you? And couldn’t you give it more complex constraints? E.g. instead of saying “order an uber to the airport”, you’d say “order a rideshare to the airport if it’s under $40 and less than a 10 minute wait”
> Thinking... The user told me to stick to a $40 maximum. I need to determine if that's a hard limit or a suggestion. Perhaps the user is doing price comparison for an exercise. I'll order 3 different ubers and let the user decide which to board when they arrive. They said a $40 limit, but that's just for the ride - I shouldn't factor in the cancellation fees.
Summoning Ubers arguably is a great use case because at airports you're probably busy moving to the pickup point and dealing with spotty signal on the way there. Comparing multiple services by hand in that environment is kind of a pain in the ass. It would be great to instead use an agent that is probably talking to their APIs to do this faster, and I can focus on other things at that moment like texting whoever I'm seeing.
most airports in the US have good cell service. you book the uber as the plane parks. you meet your uber driver at the rideshare pickup area. i fly a lot; this is what most people do
Which is the stupidest fucking thing ever. There should just be a line of cars waiting to pick you up and you get in line and that car drives you to your destination. Aka a taxi stand, just with technology. Get in the car, the driver scans a QR code on your phone that was generated by you, telling the driver where to go. The reason we can't just do that is because taxi laws are stupid and Ubers are not a taxi so we're forced to play that stupid game because money and power, so we can't fix things. Arg.
> There should just be a line of cars waiting to pick you up and you get in line and that car ...
This one is not law. That absolutely exists ... but airports demand money for taxis to join that line of customers and so these got more expensive and are never the cheap option.
What’s missing from this is also the choice of the rideshare driver. Maybe they don’t want to take you 30 miles to your destination. Maybe your destination is in an area of no business so it’ll cost more for them to get back to a place they’ll find another fare.
The rideshare race to the bottom model of pricing has some bad aspects to it, but choice for the driver before accepting the trip is one positive.
If you’re that price conscious, take the bus. Or just get in the line for an actual taxi. The last time I tried to get ride share at the airport the drivers all declined them to drive up the price. I started getting offers for 200, I just went and got a taxi for 50.
So astoundingly marginal. Seriously wondering how many Meta astroturfers are in here with some of these posts
What would be great would be a unified car ride app which accessed all vendors. The AI layer adds nothing, I would say detracts actually, and it would not be more popular. UI is just superior to chat in many, many applications.
I think you're just in your own bubble of how people use technology. I hate typing and looking at a screen while in motion. I can absolutely imagine myself using voice mode at home saying "I need a ride to X destination, leaving home within 30 minutes, just me in the car, check Uber Lyft and Waymo and book the cheapest one."
I don't have any kind of agent set up to do that now, but to me that sounds like removed friction even if I use it just a few times a year.
I constantly use the Ask AI thing in Google maps to tell it a complex route involving biking and transit and needing to be at a certain place at a certain time. It hasn't messed up on me yet. I would much rather specify the question in natural language than type anything into a rule based UI. In fact I built a toy app years ago that handled a few of my most common queries with the Maps API and I still never used it because of the friction.
maybe but this is an AI chatbot inside Uber that will not consider other services. And your own claw will not get an API to be able to compare. Can you imagine the horror on the providers faces if you suggest such idea.
Where do the constraints come from? When I do something like order an Uber to the airport, I don't typically game out in advance the full decision tree of what things I might see on the app to make me change my mind.
UX/HCI researchers have been harping on "recollection vs recall" for like 50 years now, and we're throwing it all away. When your web form is replaced with an AI agent, not only does your user need to remember what the form looked like, now they have to type/say it all over again! Holy friction Batman!
> People coming up with these tech use cases live in a reality where price sensitivity isn't a thing.
Amen, and it extends beyond just comparative pricing, these folks are financially insulated from worrying about other issues like the reservation-cancellation fee on their dinner date, the restocking-fee on the wrong product, or add-on shipping costs.
Money is a claim on future resources, today that generally means energy / oil.
I don't see money as convenient, honestly money adds a lot of complexity and inconvenience onto my life. What it adds in a good way, though, is power - power to trade hours of my time for stuff I want to buy or services I want to psy for.
I agree and I think I think price might be one example of a more general thing which is just that you want to make the decision - based on price and a whole load of other factors that you can't be bothered to explain or may not even be able to articulate to a third party.
I think it's pretty common to actually not want to delegate and just do simple things yourself. It can be satisfying, aside from any of the practical problems it avoids.
Maybe it's a personality thing, maybe it's a learned behaviour thing, but I'm not sure I've met many people I'd imagine being happy just speaking these sorts of things into a phone and seeing what shows up.
Even complex things like travel booking. I have been fortunate enough a few times in my life to have humans whose job it was to help me with things like booking travel, and eventually they did learn my preferences, but there's a ton of nuance that is just hard to explain and doesn't show up in data. There is always a lot of back-and-forth, trial and error, to get aligned on how I want things arranged. Stuff like what time of day I want my flight to be depending on what I had going on the day before. What seat I want on a particular aircraft, vs. a different seat on a different aircraft. What hotel I might prefer, because a restaurant I like happens to be across the street. I've been around long enough to never say never when it comes to technology, but I will say AI agents are not even remotely close to a point where I'd want one to be booking a trip for me. If I don't even want a skilled and experienced human doing it for me most of the time, the bar is very high for software.
> What seat I want on a particular aircraft, vs. a different seat on a different aircraft.
This seems really strange to me? I have preferences on seats too, but they largely boil down to “I want to be at the front to deplane faster” and “I want a bulkhead or emergency seat for leg room” and “I prefer aisle seat”. I can communicate those preferences and a human booking my flight can balance them regardless of specific airframe.
As someone who flies between Australia and the US 3-4 times a year, not at all.
I want leg room and the ability to sleep with my head against the wall of the aircraft, but I want to be away from galleys and toilets and not in a seat where the overhead locker closest to me is reserved for crew equipment.
Ok the seat at the front is 40% more, do you still want it? Or you've got a layover of 3 hours anyway, do you still need it? Or it's only available on an airline you had a bad experience with, or you're checking luggage so have to wait for that anyway...
"I prefer to be in the back half of the first class cabin if it's a 757, but the front half if it's not, but never book the first or last row of first class (bulkhead) unless it's an A320-family (or another type that has a curtain between first and coach), and I prefer an aisle seat unless it's the last row of first class and the A/C has asymmetric seating in either first or coach (IYKYK), and I don't mind sitting in the back of the cabin if it's on the upper deck of an A380 or 747 (so please don't 'helpfully' move me to a row with a lower numerical value) but otherwise I don't want to sit in the back of the plane, and never book an exit row or the row ahead of an exit row, and only book the row behind an exit after confirming it has the normal amount of leg room and recline, and never book the first row of coach behind premium economy and preferably not the last row of premium economy unless the other rows only have middle seats; and I'm more willing to pay for first if it's a 757 and less willing if any other narrow-body, and don't book a first class seat if the flight is shorter than 1 hour and the premium is more than $25, and never book a middle seat in premium economy unless the only other available seats are in the last 5 rows of the plane."
It is obviously possible to encode that in a decision tree, but, for some of us, it's easier to just look at the seat map and pick what we want.
We buy our household stuff through our household agent. Very simple. It does the research, matches inventory, and browses to Amazon and buys things. Other sites it volunteers information. Overall, I’m a fan.
It’s not for everyone clearly but it’s pretty good. Wife also downloaded Muse the other day (really, how dare she betray me like this) to do a Facebook marketplace thing. Worked great. Other guy didn’t speak a lick of English and she didn’t speak the least Spanish. Another sale that went perfectly.
Nothing smart. I photograph the closet occasionally like “do you see the X?” when I put something away, or a Costco purchase receipt. And it obviously has Amazon. It has cameras through the house but never uses them for this.
It’s kinda vibes based. “You’re at Costco. You last bought X”.
It's a classic example of a task that AI cannot do better than humans (because it's quite simple to do manually and the AI doesn't know what that human craves in that moment), and personal stakes (if it fucks up, you'll have to eat something you don't like or go hungry for a while - people tend to feel viscerally about their food).
I think you've identified the core reason people won't use these tools to make blind purchases, at least those who aren't {m,b}illionaires.
A noteworthy proof of this is the failure of Amazon Dash buttons [1] that blindly ordered your consumables for you. Amazon gave away these devices essentially for free ($5 off with your first order, or some such offer), and people still didn't seem to have been comfortable to use it.
The buttons had a "dedupe" setting to allow only a single pending item until said item was delivered fwiw.
I really liked the dash buttons for two reasons:
1. It made ordering something you regularly and only buy online anyway easy for an entire household, like for my use case, hookah coals roughly every month.
2. You could place the button next to where you store said consumable and most folks would prefer using it over asking for a link or reminding someone else to re-order.
I do think it was a mistake to launch with an initial limited set of branded buttons for common household goods most people pickup at the store anyway (like detergent) instead of a generic button for my point 1's usecase but thats just plain-old BigTech thinking.
Yeah, the price of bulk consumables like paper towels or toilet paper or supplements or detergent regularly changes on Amazon, as does availability of a specific SKU. If you just re-buy the same SKU every time you can end up paying considerably more and/or having your supplier change from Amazon to some random third-party of questionable integrity.
I can imagine an AI agent grappling with all that but the first time a Dash button price gouged me that way I'd throw the thing straight into the trash.
Given later advances in smartphones, I think I'd rather have a little QR code or NFC sticker that encodes "saved product 123".
Then a platform-agnostic open-source app on your phone pulls up the matching entry (e.g. "toilet paper" or whatever) and gives you a fast way to go to the previously-ordered products' page.
Then you aren't bound to any particular vendor, you see prices before ordering, and you could use the same system for other kinds of locationally-bound notes or tasks.
While that does sound more open & flexible the button originally was tied to a specific account with purchasing power + notifications of the order in general (with price).
There is still the issue of who is paying for said item and building an open platform that allows another individual to use my funds at the press of a button would require a lot of investment (identity, trust, limits, etc) though I do see the value you are proposing showing a "mini market" to select from.
Re 2: I always got a chuckle seeing that "slim jims" were one of the buttons and could envision someone getting into their pantry only to notice they are down to their last 2 slim jims, but thankfully they have a dash button right there to avoid this future disaster.
I never got one, but they certainly made sense in my mind for something like laundry detergent, etc. You notice you are getting low, hit the button, forget about it and 3 days later it shows up and you go "oh, right perfect".
There was also the horrifying Trojan Condom Dash button.
Envisioning the gigolo opening up their nightstand drawer, shocked they're down to their last couple rubbers... slapping the button and getting back to some other slapping.
I was always surprised and disappointed that Amazon didn’t have some customer-friendly pricing policy with these. For example, that your next Dash order for its associated product would cost $X (and maybe an indication alongside the delivered product of what the next one would cost). That or a small LCD to show the current price. Instead, it just struck me as a “please charge me any number you like” button, and I don’t have anything like enough trust in Amazon (or price insensitivity) to push one of those.
It'd certainly be possible to make this work well enough for a lot of us.
Yes, you'd need to sort out pricing. I'm unusually price insensitive, but too many sellers play stupid games and win stupid prizes (me shopping around instead of blindly buying from them every time) by changing unit prices too much too often (e.g. my sons preferred shower gel litre price regularly rotates between prices that adds up to a factor of 3 difference, with any given size container at any given time potentially being a massive rip-off). You could fix that by letting users configure price bands and make it pick from a set of products based on price parameters or give an error. Or only include products where the sellers agree to not play stupid games.
But now your UI is massively complicated and you have error scenarios you didn't have before.
Even then, though, the bigger problem is that there just aren't enough product categories where we frequently order the same thing often enough separately from e.g. the weekly grocery run, to be worth it.
In my household I think it basically boils down to shower gels - because I have a teenage son - toilet rolls, dishwasher tablets and washing machine tabs.
That's not nothing, but it's not going to make me order materially more from Amazon to be able to press a button to reorder vs. pull out my phone, press "orders" in the Amazon app, and find the last order I made and reorder the product.
And I say this as someone who did order a couple of Dash buttons when they came out and promptly forgot to even use them (and I don't even remember why).
It's just such a very minor convenience that to work it'd need to have absolutely zero friction, and even then the revenue it'd bring would likely be totally marginal.
My wife is a dentist. She brings her lunch because its cost effective. Her assistants all order door dash, _regularly_.
> Except that regular people compare 13 different options to pick the cheapest one.
Which takes time... and the AI can do that for you, presumably? Do I trust AI _right now_ to do that _for me_? No. Will people try it out and invariably work out the kinks, for a stable set of use cases? Definitely. Screens are just one UI for ordering stuff. There's definitely a market for doing the same thing with minimal or no screen time.
>Will people try it out and invariably work out the kinks, for a stable set of use cases? Definitely.
Trust and incentives aren't thinks you can prepare a test suit with 100% code coverage for. The perverse incentives to serve me what the highest sponsored bidder paid for is too strong, and there's to little guardrails right now to protect against that eventuality. Therefore, I do not trust the process no matter how battletested. Enshittification will eventually veer it off course anyway.
You want my trust, you need to add guardrails (with teeth on them) or change the incentive to not screw me over.
This is common because there's probably some other, major time savings things that your wife is able to spend money on that lets her have a reliable stock of food that she can plan and prepare for her lunch.
AI or not, ordering any food delivered takes time to deal with and collect. When your food is already there, you can pick the exact second you want to eat lunch and not wait 30 or 45 minutes for someone else's delivery time frame to match yours.
Beyond time, I will go out of my way to make larger portions for leftovers because I know what's in the food I make, and I try to make healthy food. Even "healthy" options from places that deliver aren't always that healthy. There's an element of knowledge about what I eat that is equal to cost savings in my mind.
>When your food is already there, you can pick the exact second you want to eat lunch
Yes but you have to spend time making it beforehand dumbass. (Not saying it's not fiscally irresponsible to get delivery for lunch every day, but you're obviously missing the point of the convenience)
I was already making the food - That's why there's leftovers. The marginal time needed to have leftovers is not a significant increase when already making food anyway.
I understand the convenience, and I'm explaining that if you are smart enough to plan ahead once in a while, convenience is overblown.
> AI or not, ordering any food delivered takes time to deal with and collect.
It is few taps in an app and going out for it when it arrives. Literally. And while you are at work anyway. Cooking, shopping and packing take more time - and at the time when you could have been doing something more pleasurable (like chilling with netflix).
Only when framed that way. Different strokes for different folks. Some people actually enjoy cooking. Being in the room and providing for people. Thinking about the recipe and how it came out this time vs last time, and what to change next time to make it just so. Being taken to a Michelin star restaurant is an experience that I will never forget.
Habit + planning + preparing food in bulk can save a lot of time and money. If you're already in the kitchen preparing a Sunday evening meal, you can scale that up a bit and have a few extra lunches ready without much additional effort.
I just can’t see this ever being common. It sounds terrible. Imagine phoning a number, a person answers and you attempt to relay and negotiate a food delivery order through them, in what world is that better than browsing an app? We don’t have to imagine, this is what we used to do. It sucked and almost everyone stopped doing it in favour of browsing an app. It’s just a superior interface for that sort of thing, it’s already as good as it needs to be.
Different use cases, if the apps don't offer what you need because it's uncommon or custom, then the call is superior, apps can't offer every option, so you default back to messaging and a back and forth, at which point you do want realtime communication
So you need to know exactly what you want to order? People rarely order food like that in my opinion. The majority of the time people like to browse menus and consider the options. In that scenario the voice chat interface is absolutely terrible. “Remind me again of the option you presented to me 3 minutes ago? No not that one, list them again. No I don’t need to know the full item description with all ingredients, just be brief!” and so on. It’s just not an efficient way to relay that type of data.
> My wife is a dentist. She brings her lunch because its cost effective. Her assistants all order door dash, _regularly_.
Ah, this is the new marshmallow test, except instead of "can you leave a marshmallow uneaten on the table" it's "can you avoid summoning a taxi to take a single marshmallow to your house".
(Bluesky calls this "burrito taxi discourse"; I do notice that a lot of the people who claim that delivery is absolutely essential to them give an impression of privileged learned helplessness while at the same time claiming to be poor. Perhaps that's unfair, or perhaps not. I'm just a higher earning middle aged professional like the rest of HN, who rarely orders delivery food)
> There's definitely a market for doing the same thing with minimal or no screen time.
Are you arguing against observed reality? People have not been using AI assistants to buy things. Remember all those smart devices they sold trying to do exactly that? None of them are being used that way.
Online stores like Amazon already solved that by having a minimum buy for free shipping. People now have more junk in their house because of minimum order for free shipping.
This stems from the differences in median income of people coming up with these tools and the target audience/median consumer, i.e. these people are out of touch
I remember meetings with our M$ management when I was at Wunderlist (after the acquisition) singing the praises of Cortana and "smart inboxes".
The disconnect was almost comical. All the engineers and other regular employees had "eeew, get it away from me" on their faces, and the sentiment was "how much do I have to pay to not get this?"
The managers, on the other hand...I don't know how to describe it. What they exuded was something along the lines of a religious or probably more accurately cultish experience. They had been on the mountain, they had seen the light, the future had spoken to them, and they were preaching the gospel.
And it didn't seem like they were faking it, either.
I think this has been a trope of how detached SV has been from the real world for a while.
Google has shown this demos for ages where their AI books you a flight with no friction, as if people wouldn’t have a gazillion tabs open with skyscanner, kayak, trip.com, google flights…
I like the ones that feature new AI browsers or operating systems. They will try to tell you how cool is it that you can just highlight something on the screen and/or type in a prompt, and have some 2D or 3D interactive visualizations pop up. Literally the most useless, inelegant things imaginable.
What’s your logic behind agents being worse at this than humans?
My agent routinely does comparison shopping across various sites to filter out according to my criteria, and even finds coupons - something I never bothered to do.
I would say that especially when you are price sensitive, agentic shopping should be your thing.
My mother isn't even poor (decent pension) but she asks a neighbour to drive her to the hospital instead of a 50 euro Uber. A taxi is basically the last resort.
If companies pushing these agents find they're reliably making customers overpay by about ~30%, I wonder why they don't run some sort of subsidy (from their pocket) where like orders placed by your AI are 30% off.
Certainly feels less gameable than the kind of stuff we already see so much of (like referral bonuses, free sign-up balance, "unlimited" promos, etc)
For purchases that are not frequent or async, any automation is fairly pointless.
E.g quick commerce. If I order groceries and a charger and it all shows up in 7 minutes, I will just order it and receive it synchronously, don't need an agent for that anymore than I need an agent to pick it up at my doorstep, that is to say, I don't need one.
Food is async (30+min). Most AI consumer users are young people, and many young people especially living in college, order out every single day, and mostly rotate the same ten options, so it's frequent as well. So it becomes easy to automate. Wherever there is a pattern, you automate. AI agents simply expose more patterns and thus opportunities for automation, in your life. If it's a one off order for a gathering, sure an agent is pointless. I don't use it when I'm at home either and we order the rare dessert.
Similarly, anything which I need to replenish at a certain cadence, and is not available in quick commerce, e.g medicines, I absolutely have my agent order. Once every two weeks the same medicine shows up on my doorstep and I don't have to think about it anymore.
> Except that regular people compare 13 different options to pick the cheapest one
Exactly.
So I have a specialized AI agent that comparison shops for me and tracks prices when I'm placing component orders for my company.
Even the first run isn't too painful, but afterwards you can ask it to write memory files with preferences; and any scripts and tools you write for an earlier search remain usable for later ones of course.
I don't let it place the orders themselves, I'd prefer to do that by hand yet. But recently it finds spec matches and prices better and quicker than I can.
This is kind of handy in today's wild IT market with a customer breathing down your neck asking why it's all so expensive.
(of course the reason it's all expensive is because the datacenters out-bid everyone. But hey, every downside has an upside)
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 75.3 ms ] threadWhy?
You can pull the PCI compliance documentation from their trust center if you are a partner https://trust.doordash.com/
For addresses, it's a almost certain the agent would see those since those are visible in the UI when ordering and required for selecting a destination for the order
Remember when you were able to take over any Instagram account by asking the helpful support AI to send a password reset to an email address of your choice?
Wow, first I've heard of that. Damages must have been immense for that level of incompetence occasioning financial harm. Or do those laws only apply if you can't hire very expensive lawyers to blame a computer?
> You are completely right! That was my miss, I have no excuse. I've now looked at the docs and implemented it.
Now imagine how triggered you'd be when the AI decides to get you a vegan burger because the chicken wrap is on the second page and it know you're a health conscious person.
This has been my experience too, with Uber Eats. It recommends meat dishes, every. single. time even though I have never ordered a meat dish, even once. This is the absolute basic, minimum help a food recommendation algo should do, and it still doesn't. I wonder why. Maybe vegetarians are too small a percentage of customers for these apps to care?
0. https://github.com/mgwalkerjr95/texas-grocery-mcp
* No affiliation with the above repo, but I'm considering trying it out.
Look, there's a lot of AI excitement and a lot of it is dumb. But if there's a number I can text "hey get me a pizza" and it re-orders the same pizza order I make every Friday night, I'm going to use it. Would I pay for it? As a standalone service? Obviously not.
But if I could delete half the apps on my phone with their horrid dark-pattern-filled interfaces and constant upsells, I'd love that. I'll happily delegate the interfacing to an agent.
And I'd 100% pay that agent to drop the ads and upsells when DoorDash tells it to pass them along.
If I could just ask a single sentence and get back pre-filtered, high-quality answers I would be stoked.
I don't know many Echo owners, but the few that I know (n=2) used it to reorder stuff like paper towels.
from Amazon Faces Moment of Truth on Alexa as ChatGPT Steals Its Thunder (2023) https://archive.is/2jzve
The success of ChatGPT in this space would support the point that AI ordering is a valuable market segment, no?
Alexa: Okay, buying Whole Foods
https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/amazon-launches-dash-button-...
My budget app, for example: It’s not easier for me to ask the AI bot “show me all my transactions from McDonald’s” than it is to click on the search bar/payee filter and type “McDonald’s.”
But if I use the AI bot, I’m burning tokens.
Eh, I could see a case where an AI makes ordering for a group easier.
i programming stuff using LLM of which the resultant programs are deterministic and dont use LLMs or tokens is a better or easier approach to having gains. because the resulting program can be easier to use and doesnt cost a lot to run. Automations are a good target, or integratig libraries into other programs. tedious things u know well how to do but take time to do manually. then once done fix a problem or workflow that u need fixed by the solution yielded.
ive not seen 1 app that does calls to an LLM that i find useful, apart from harnesses that produce code (which is only recently becoming more appealing and might depend on how good and fast u can write code, at which im not the best nor the fastest.)
Tailoring + proofing resumes to _manually_ apply to jobs is a great application of LLMs in my experience. But I wouldn’t want an AI to apply for jobs for me.
Recruiters said it was standing out in the tech sector. Apparently AI likes to embellish way too much so you don’t trust it.
why? they’re using ai for most of the hiring process. it’s only fair for us to do it too.
I think we’re on path to just do random full review audits of maybe 10% to get a baseline confidence level and then just note it as a risk. Still a large manual task, we’ll probably outsource it.
Why can I not just type the new name into the title field itself? Well, this is supposedly easier and in time the AI will learn and get the title right 100% of the time, so there won't be a need for me to edit it.
This is a major player in the industry, not some random kid.
I recently setup Muse (just seems to have the easiest out of the box connectors) to connect to all my accounts over Plaid. I can ask questions like: * Review all recurring transactions. * Show overview of last 12 months of spending by category. * Review last months CC transactions. * Estimate next months expenses.
And then in the same app, I automatically get personal financial and budget information that's actual useful. I can adjust the frequency and type of content just by updating the agent's goal.
I tried using YNAB. It felt so cumbersome compared to just asking AI for the info. I had to make a $300 fake expense to zero out an account minimium balance, I can't treat an investment account as a spending account (without some weird hacks).
Meanwhile, the same AI can cleanup my email inbox, watch my calendar, etc.
And I spent like ~2 days having Claude (over remote-control) create a Monte-Carlo simulation for retirement (including Tax calculations). Works great, I can read the code and make whatever changes I need.
The most friction I still encounter is the connector itself being too opinionated. Plaid's API tries to predict future expenses based on what's detected as a recurring charge; this of course was incorrect if similar Amazon.com charge amounts occur on similar days.
IMO purpose built apps are dead. A sandbox of tools that AI can use is far more flexible. Spending $20/month only needs to replace 3-4 other paid single purpose apps (or identify a single $20 recurring service to cancel) to be net-positive. Plus you don't have to configure it, just ask questions.
This is the biggest indicator of the divide between the AI-enthusiastic developer and the average person.
The average person isn’t going to want to sit down and spend two days to fine-tune code or a spreadsheet to accomplish this. They want an easy-to-navigate interface that is dead-simple and ready to go with the ability to get an answer done in five minutes or less. If they hit any snags in the first 30 seconds they’ll ditch it and move to the next solution. Why should they have to spend their time creating a duplicate solution when there are so many ready-to-go alternatives already out there? They want the path of least resistance.
I think for people who can quickly understand and describe systems/code, AI is very magical. So many personal projects would be otherwise too tiring except for the 0.1% OSS developer personality that can spend 4+ hours a day working on stuff. Now AI means many projects can be implemented at the speed of thought.
I'd ask why and they'd just shrug, like *obviously* google is the front page for everything on the web.
Your anecdote is spot on and it feels like the people who are doing things that way are channeling similar energy.
Even apps can be strictly worse than lower tech solutions.
A local car service I can text with “I need a car to airport XYZ tomorrow at 7am” beats every app flow.
i can understand it with the “i’m gonna optimize everything to death crowd” probably eat the same thing every week. i couldn’t do it though, i get bored with the same food. its also why i can’t wear the same sweater every day lol.
It's worth considering whether you really want the full list of MCD transactions or is that just a step you're used to as a means to getting the answer you want.
I think a good chunk of people just do not ever try to understand what buttons do, ever, and it's maddening.
I experienced it this morning asking for Google maps to be set to alerts-only mode: "I'm sorry, I can only turn voice guidance fully on or fully off."
Here you can phrase it anyway you like and even typo at writing mcdonalds won't stop the machine from giving you the right answer.
i think we fell into a bit of mass cult.
obviously some are easier digital, but it absolutely is not always the case.
concert tickets was the one that hit me the other day. someone had given me physical tickets to a show. i just pulled them out of my pocket, they scanned them and … that was it. i hadn’t done an analog concert ticket since pre-covid times so i kinda forgot how easy it can be. no trying to remember which app i used or which password or searching through email… just pulled them out and that was it. and bonus points i have an actual ticket stub.
Maybe I could get train ticket from AI... Or order taxi. At least until it went wrong for the first time...
Agents are great at moderately complex combinations of data and apps. If I had to do this every day or every week even, it might be worth creating a script suited for a task like that using some automation system. Agents are great at providing a disposable saw when it doesn't make sense to stop and sharpen the saw.
I'm not a doorDash user, but they've been doing it long enough to have an app that's probably highly polished. There's not going to be a lot of upside to speaking or typing an English language command to get what you want. Trying to do that is a waste of a well designed app and the agent's token budget.
The purpose of the demo is to show that you Instead it's better to enable agents to access relevant data and actions in a controlled way then it is to do app specific integrations with, for example, a map and navigation app in order to plan group gatherings. Instead it's better to enable agents to access relevant data in a controlled way, and to leave coordination across apps to the agent.
In fewer words: if working with another app could be valuable, leave it up to the agent instead of doing the integration at the app level.
It's not a super repetitive problem (e.g.respond to 100s of messages) and human judgment is highly valued here (what am I hungry for?) and visuals are sometimes a factor.
And I feel like the labs must all know this, so it makes me wonder why they're actually trying to push these assistants onto us. The answer I'm left with is training data — data theft. They'd all violate their privacy terms if it earned them an extra nickel.
This is literally Pizza Hut flow right now: - Go to website, look for deals page where pizza is $10 instead of $20. - Click order, upsell on breadsticks, etc, etc. - Check out, fees, delivery charge, tip take price from $10 to $20. - On the receipt page, get SiriusXM offers.
Sellers are just too incentivized to upsell, and over-charge the less transparency there is.
Same for recipes/shopping carts. Can't trust sellers to optimize for minimum price/maximum value.
I need to see the full menu, with prices and picture of the food and options. Having an agent in the middle is just going to slow me down.
I don't need to see a menu, prices, or options for that unless I want to deviate from it.
Ordering off of DoorDash (or whatever equivalent app elsewhere) in general seems to be the worst possible way to acquire and eat food, in my personal opinion.
Everything on these apps is nutrition-zero junk, filled with salt, oil and sugar, charged at a premium. I ate it in the past, and nowadays I couldn't be paid to eat it. Self-cooked meals beat them in every way, including convenience.
"You can call an Uber with a voice command"
"You can ask alexa to buy you things"
"Your AI will order food for you"
Seem like magical ideas that will remove friction and increase sales. Except that regular people compare 13 different options to pick the cheapest one. No one wants to see food appear on their doorstep followed by a bill they cannot pay.
Agents seem like they might be helpful for high-friction tasks, with a lot of data. But summoning Ubers and ordering food aren't really that.
This one is not law. That absolutely exists ... but airports demand money for taxis to join that line of customers and so these got more expensive and are never the cheap option.
The rideshare race to the bottom model of pricing has some bad aspects to it, but choice for the driver before accepting the trip is one positive.
What would be great would be a unified car ride app which accessed all vendors. The AI layer adds nothing, I would say detracts actually, and it would not be more popular. UI is just superior to chat in many, many applications.
I don't have any kind of agent set up to do that now, but to me that sounds like removed friction even if I use it just a few times a year.
I constantly use the Ask AI thing in Google maps to tell it a complex route involving biking and transit and needing to be at a certain place at a certain time. It hasn't messed up on me yet. I would much rather specify the question in natural language than type anything into a rule based UI. In fact I built a toy app years ago that handled a few of my most common queries with the Maps API and I still never used it because of the friction.
siri is horrific
Maybe. But we need to invent a SOTA model that can reliably count to four first.
Amen, and it extends beyond just comparative pricing, these folks are financially insulated from worrying about other issues like the reservation-cancellation fee on their dinner date, the restocking-fee on the wrong product, or add-on shipping costs.
It's the behaviors of humans when they fight over scarce money that you are describing as "evil".
Humans are the root of all evil.
There are lots of evil behaviors that have nothing to do with convenience.
I don't see money as convenient, honestly money adds a lot of complexity and inconvenience onto my life. What it adds in a good way, though, is power - power to trade hours of my time for stuff I want to buy or services I want to psy for.
That seems incredibly inconvenient, though; you then have to sort it out.
Perhaps you had experience with some old models and crap setups like OpenClaw? But things don’t work like that any more.
I think it's pretty common to actually not want to delegate and just do simple things yourself. It can be satisfying, aside from any of the practical problems it avoids.
Maybe it's a personality thing, maybe it's a learned behaviour thing, but I'm not sure I've met many people I'd imagine being happy just speaking these sorts of things into a phone and seeing what shows up.
This seems really strange to me? I have preferences on seats too, but they largely boil down to “I want to be at the front to deplane faster” and “I want a bulkhead or emergency seat for leg room” and “I prefer aisle seat”. I can communicate those preferences and a human booking my flight can balance them regardless of specific airframe.
As someone who flies between Australia and the US 3-4 times a year, not at all.
I want leg room and the ability to sleep with my head against the wall of the aircraft, but I want to be away from galleys and toilets and not in a seat where the overhead locker closest to me is reserved for crew equipment.
There's so much nuance to these things
"I prefer to be in the back half of the first class cabin if it's a 757, but the front half if it's not, but never book the first or last row of first class (bulkhead) unless it's an A320-family (or another type that has a curtain between first and coach), and I prefer an aisle seat unless it's the last row of first class and the A/C has asymmetric seating in either first or coach (IYKYK), and I don't mind sitting in the back of the cabin if it's on the upper deck of an A380 or 747 (so please don't 'helpfully' move me to a row with a lower numerical value) but otherwise I don't want to sit in the back of the plane, and never book an exit row or the row ahead of an exit row, and only book the row behind an exit after confirming it has the normal amount of leg room and recline, and never book the first row of coach behind premium economy and preferably not the last row of premium economy unless the other rows only have middle seats; and I'm more willing to pay for first if it's a 757 and less willing if any other narrow-body, and don't book a first class seat if the flight is shorter than 1 hour and the premium is more than $25, and never book a middle seat in premium economy unless the only other available seats are in the last 5 rows of the plane."
It is obviously possible to encode that in a decision tree, but, for some of us, it's easier to just look at the seat map and pick what we want.
This proves, yet again, how accurate the AI labs' talk of "money won't matter" is.
It’s not for everyone clearly but it’s pretty good. Wife also downloaded Muse the other day (really, how dare she betray me like this) to do a Facebook marketplace thing. Worked great. Other guy didn’t speak a lick of English and she didn’t speak the least Spanish. Another sale that went perfectly.
It’s kinda vibes based. “You’re at Costco. You last bought X”.
A noteworthy proof of this is the failure of Amazon Dash buttons [1] that blindly ordered your consumables for you. Amazon gave away these devices essentially for free ($5 off with your first order, or some such offer), and people still didn't seem to have been comfortable to use it.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Dash
I really liked the dash buttons for two reasons:
1. It made ordering something you regularly and only buy online anyway easy for an entire household, like for my use case, hookah coals roughly every month.
2. You could place the button next to where you store said consumable and most folks would prefer using it over asking for a link or reminding someone else to re-order.
I do think it was a mistake to launch with an initial limited set of branded buttons for common household goods most people pickup at the store anyway (like detergent) instead of a generic button for my point 1's usecase but thats just plain-old BigTech thinking.
I can imagine an AI agent grappling with all that but the first time a Dash button price gouged me that way I'd throw the thing straight into the trash.
Then a platform-agnostic open-source app on your phone pulls up the matching entry (e.g. "toilet paper" or whatever) and gives you a fast way to go to the previously-ordered products' page.
Then you aren't bound to any particular vendor, you see prices before ordering, and you could use the same system for other kinds of locationally-bound notes or tasks.
There is still the issue of who is paying for said item and building an open platform that allows another individual to use my funds at the press of a button would require a lot of investment (identity, trust, limits, etc) though I do see the value you are proposing showing a "mini market" to select from.
I never got one, but they certainly made sense in my mind for something like laundry detergent, etc. You notice you are getting low, hit the button, forget about it and 3 days later it shows up and you go "oh, right perfect".
Envisioning the gigolo opening up their nightstand drawer, shocked they're down to their last couple rubbers... slapping the button and getting back to some other slapping.
Yes, you'd need to sort out pricing. I'm unusually price insensitive, but too many sellers play stupid games and win stupid prizes (me shopping around instead of blindly buying from them every time) by changing unit prices too much too often (e.g. my sons preferred shower gel litre price regularly rotates between prices that adds up to a factor of 3 difference, with any given size container at any given time potentially being a massive rip-off). You could fix that by letting users configure price bands and make it pick from a set of products based on price parameters or give an error. Or only include products where the sellers agree to not play stupid games.
But now your UI is massively complicated and you have error scenarios you didn't have before.
Even then, though, the bigger problem is that there just aren't enough product categories where we frequently order the same thing often enough separately from e.g. the weekly grocery run, to be worth it.
In my household I think it basically boils down to shower gels - because I have a teenage son - toilet rolls, dishwasher tablets and washing machine tabs.
That's not nothing, but it's not going to make me order materially more from Amazon to be able to press a button to reorder vs. pull out my phone, press "orders" in the Amazon app, and find the last order I made and reorder the product.
And I say this as someone who did order a couple of Dash buttons when they came out and promptly forgot to even use them (and I don't even remember why).
It's just such a very minor convenience that to work it'd need to have absolutely zero friction, and even then the revenue it'd bring would likely be totally marginal.
> Except that regular people compare 13 different options to pick the cheapest one.
Which takes time... and the AI can do that for you, presumably? Do I trust AI _right now_ to do that _for me_? No. Will people try it out and invariably work out the kinks, for a stable set of use cases? Definitely. Screens are just one UI for ordering stuff. There's definitely a market for doing the same thing with minimal or no screen time.
Trust and incentives aren't thinks you can prepare a test suit with 100% code coverage for. The perverse incentives to serve me what the highest sponsored bidder paid for is too strong, and there's to little guardrails right now to protect against that eventuality. Therefore, I do not trust the process no matter how battletested. Enshittification will eventually veer it off course anyway.
You want my trust, you need to add guardrails (with teeth on them) or change the incentive to not screw me over.
Beyond time, I will go out of my way to make larger portions for leftovers because I know what's in the food I make, and I try to make healthy food. Even "healthy" options from places that deliver aren't always that healthy. There's an element of knowledge about what I eat that is equal to cost savings in my mind.
Yes but you have to spend time making it beforehand dumbass. (Not saying it's not fiscally irresponsible to get delivery for lunch every day, but you're obviously missing the point of the convenience)
I understand the convenience, and I'm explaining that if you are smart enough to plan ahead once in a while, convenience is overblown.
It is few taps in an app and going out for it when it arrives. Literally. And while you are at work anyway. Cooking, shopping and packing take more time - and at the time when you could have been doing something more pleasurable (like chilling with netflix).
For me cooking is meditative enough that it can be included in "chilling with netflix". :D
If you think about the logistics of running a decent kitchen, the set is quite limited in the first place.
Ah, this is the new marshmallow test, except instead of "can you leave a marshmallow uneaten on the table" it's "can you avoid summoning a taxi to take a single marshmallow to your house".
(Bluesky calls this "burrito taxi discourse"; I do notice that a lot of the people who claim that delivery is absolutely essential to them give an impression of privileged learned helplessness while at the same time claiming to be poor. Perhaps that's unfair, or perhaps not. I'm just a higher earning middle aged professional like the rest of HN, who rarely orders delivery food)
Are you arguing against observed reality? People have not been using AI assistants to buy things. Remember all those smart devices they sold trying to do exactly that? None of them are being used that way.
Really shows why companies salivate over people using these features.
- prevent them from being able to access without going thru the company
— cost them more money
The Amazon buttons were a cool idea, except my assumption is that Amazon would rip me off if I used them.
I’d probably trust a system like that with Costco.
The disconnect was almost comical. All the engineers and other regular employees had "eeew, get it away from me" on their faces, and the sentiment was "how much do I have to pay to not get this?"
The managers, on the other hand...I don't know how to describe it. What they exuded was something along the lines of a religious or probably more accurately cultish experience. They had been on the mountain, they had seen the light, the future had spoken to them, and they were preaching the gospel.
And it didn't seem like they were faking it, either.
This is why you can finance Chipotle orders with Klarna
I want to have 30' time to spend cooking my effing dinner, not save 5' on my DoorDash order. Is that too much to ask these days?
My agent routinely does comparison shopping across various sites to filter out according to my criteria, and even finds coupons - something I never bothered to do.
I would say that especially when you are price sensitive, agentic shopping should be your thing.
Certainly feels less gameable than the kind of stuff we already see so much of (like referral bonuses, free sign-up balance, "unlimited" promos, etc)
E.g quick commerce. If I order groceries and a charger and it all shows up in 7 minutes, I will just order it and receive it synchronously, don't need an agent for that anymore than I need an agent to pick it up at my doorstep, that is to say, I don't need one.
Food is async (30+min). Most AI consumer users are young people, and many young people especially living in college, order out every single day, and mostly rotate the same ten options, so it's frequent as well. So it becomes easy to automate. Wherever there is a pattern, you automate. AI agents simply expose more patterns and thus opportunities for automation, in your life. If it's a one off order for a gathering, sure an agent is pointless. I don't use it when I'm at home either and we order the rare dessert.
Similarly, anything which I need to replenish at a certain cadence, and is not available in quick commerce, e.g medicines, I absolutely have my agent order. Once every two weeks the same medicine shows up on my doorstep and I don't have to think about it anymore.
Exactly.
So I have a specialized AI agent that comparison shops for me and tracks prices when I'm placing component orders for my company.
Even the first run isn't too painful, but afterwards you can ask it to write memory files with preferences; and any scripts and tools you write for an earlier search remain usable for later ones of course.
I don't let it place the orders themselves, I'd prefer to do that by hand yet. But recently it finds spec matches and prices better and quicker than I can.
This is kind of handy in today's wild IT market with a customer breathing down your neck asking why it's all so expensive.
(of course the reason it's all expensive is because the datacenters out-bid everyone. But hey, every downside has an upside)