zlacker

I'm a bit surprised that people need an LLM to automate things like this. Is the market really that large, to cause such a hype? I don't think I'm being "elitist" by having a calendar and a pen, am I..?

The one tangible usecase is perhaps booking things. But, personally, I don't mind paying 5-10% extra by going to a local store and speaking to a real person. Or perhaps intentionally buying ecological. Or whatever. What is life if you have a robot optimize everything you do? What is left?

>>baalim+(OP)
heartily agree. It takes ~10s to see what's in the freezer. Also "this is water" etc

>>baalim+(OP)
I think part of it is the person that wrote the blog is very wealthy. They mention a personal assistant, very expensive fashion items, and hotel reservations that are 2x the price I paid for my honeymoon. Most people are probably cross shopping Walmart brand milk with name brand, and they aren’t dropping hundreds a month on an AI subscription. It’s a class thing combined with the Bay Area engineer bubble mentality —- I have some family that came from money and they just see the world completely differently, they can’t fathom life in say, Kansas at median household income.

>>baalim+(OP)
Well websites like AirBnB tend to make it as difficult as humanly possible to automate stuff like this, so maybe?

Although that likely only lasts until they learn how to block LLMs effectively.

>>baalim+(OP)
If you're happy "speaking to a real person" when you could automate that interaction away somehow then no, digital personal assistants probably aren't something you're going to care about.

I love talking to real people about stuff that matters to them and to me. I don't want to talk to them about booking a flight or hotel room.

>>simonw+q3
If hotels, or google, or travel websites wanted people to book programmatically they would have an api.Remember when Google search had an api? In the end the human is responsible for the purchase. I think when the dust settles, AI will offer a "do you want to purchase?" and then the human will press the button. Or ChatGPT or somebody controlling the last step will have that button, and services will accept it (like Instagram) because it brings business.

>>baalim+(OP)
Totally agree its basically the equivalent of a few low end apps as of now. The interesting thing to me is that it does MANY low end apps all together.

It's a calendar, reminder, notebook, fridge scanner, and a webscraper

I think the interesting idea here is that overtime this will grow to more applications. None require integration or effort to work you only need plug the infrastructure and tooling.

This to me is what will eventually wipe out most agentic startups. The enterprise version of this little thing is just a bot and a set of documents of what it should do and a few tools. Why pay and setup a new system when I can just automate what I already have?

>>mejuto+l4
The reason they don't have an API is that they want to upsell you on other stuff, and get paid to promote their partners.

There's going to be a huge fight over how that relates to AI assistants over the next few years.

>>simonw+q3
The nuances contained in ”booking a flight or hotel room” are plenty, it matters a lot to a lot of people. The industry will probably be very very happy to have bots do it, the amount of extra revenue they will get by taking the tricks made for humans to the next level is going to be substantial.

>>mejuto+l4
This only lasts until dark patterns can be inserted that disrupt the ease of use that agents are currently providing. If I can't force the end user to watch unskippable ads or trick them into spending money on a service they don't need, what are we even doing?

>>contra+13
We may get to a point where they have a hard time distinguishing. Perhaps it can be made in their interest to open the API for everyone (i.e. convince the bean counters)

>>baalim+(OP)
There's a lot of irony right now regarding the cost of these things too (although I know the cost curve will drop over time). I know developers that are burning $1,000/day on tokens for Claude Code or VC's using the $200/month ChatGPT pricing plan who are then talking about Vibe coding TurboTax away. TurboTax for most people is $50 to $100 a year. We are still a far way off even from a cost justification standpoint let alone a reliability standpoint of relying on a vibe coded solution for filing your taxes.

>>baalim+(OP)
IMHO the "killer app" aspect of OpenClaw (and similar) is that everything is now an API.

We think of chat apps, like WhatsApp, as being ways to communicate with people, which is a nice way of saying they are protocols. When you want something, you send a message, and you get an answer, just like with HTTP, except the endpoints have been controlled by meat. With OpenClaw, the meat is gone. Now you can send a message on WhatsApp to schedule a date with your spouse, their OpenClaw will respond with availability, they'll negotiate a time and place. We've replaced human communication with an ad-hoc, open-ended date-negotiation protocol, using English instead of JSON as a data-interchange format, and OpenClaw as the interface library.

You can say "make an appointment at my dentist" and even if your dentist doesn't have a website, the bot can call up and schedule an appointment. (I don't know if OpenClaw can do this now, but it seems inevitable.) In other words, the (human) receptionist is now an API that can be accessed programmatically.

>>hackyh+Oc
If we insist on using that term, let's be more precise: Everything is a horrendously expensive API that will give you subtly incorrect behaviour at random.

>>simonw+B7
I agree fully, and wanted to add: for many of these services, like travel engine comparison sites, running the query itself costs money, so you do not want to make it to easy to search without booking.

>>mvdtnz+Mg
Humans are also famous for introducing errors in their communication. I think the AI-to-AI interface will only improve on that .

The price is high now but will get cheaper, especially when compared to the cost of human labor.

Having said that, it sounds like an isolating and boring way to live.

>>hackyh+Oc
> We've replaced human communication with an ad-hoc, open-ended date-negotiation protocol, using English instead of JSON as a data-interchange format, and OpenClaw as the interface library.

People heralding this as a good thing is extremely disturbing.