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Comment by maartenbreddels | Hacker News Reader

We (the authors of the Solara web app framework) were inspired by the OpenAI keynote Wanderlust app they demoed and rebuilt it in Python using Solara. It would be good to showcase our framework's power and inspire others to build UI's with AI/LLM elements in it.

GitHub: https://github.com/widgetti/wanderlust App: https://huggingface.co/spaces/solara-dev/wanderlust X: https://twitter.com/maartenbreddels/status/17223244907077020... Solara: https://github.com/widgetti/solara/

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My dream is to have a real AI-powered travel agent that would do all the discovery stuff per my constraints and selections and then book reservations (where needed) for anything. The AI agent would fill out all the necessary online forms or make calls and collect confirmations. Then it would present me with my itinerary which I can ask it to change at any time.

I’m curious what are you thinking the advantages of using an AI only agent for this? For example, compared to Anywhere.com, where human experts are the agents.

what's their cut on something like that?

I just took a look at it. Seems to focus only on a handful of international spots plus now it's asking me to book a 30 minute meeting with someone. I don't mind filling in preferences and whatnot, but once you introduce a human to the mix I feel like i'm at the whim and mercy of that 1 person with their skillset, communication ability, attitude, business motivations, etc.

I did a bit more research. Seems they make their money from tours and hotels they work with which typically leads to shittier value for the customer.

I want my ai to have as little financial incentive for itself and only maximize my needs. I'd pay for THAT.

You do realize though that in terms of the business model, having the AI partner with select resorts and tour guides is a much more lucrative business model for the AI tour planning company?

In the end, you'll end up with Booking.com with extra steps:

"Perfect, ugh123! I've got just the hotel for you! It's the Marriott Grand Paradise, our top partner hotel. It is only 45 miles away from the specific address you requested and just barely $150 over budget per night, but they have a 4.9 rating, and with their Top Partner status, you earn 10 BookiePoints by booking there. Hurry, 33 people have booked a room there in the last hour! Do you confirm? Whoops, one more booking just now, only one room left! Do you want to save yours now?"

But how much are you willing to pay for this service?

because it's not like human travel agents don't exist today, just like human drivers exist today. Does having an AI book the tickets for you meaningfully change the things for you, the customer?

Since it's automated, it could cost less than a dollar per booking, orders of magnitude less than what a travel agent could offer.

>Does having an AI book the tickets for you meaningfully change the things for you, the customer?

Of course it does. You don't think replacing humans in the full service travel industry wouldn't drive down costs and upgrade capabilities and experience could be a thing?

The industry, obviously. How does that affect the customer experience though? If call up my travel agent and have them book a vacation for me, what's the difference between that and calling TravelGPT and having it book a vacation for me?

These days I purposefully avoid as much travel research as possible, and intently choose to immerse in the place and moment instead. I'm happy to miss that 4.97 stars dinner place, and instead enjoy interacting with a less-than-Instagram-perfect dinner & perhaps some flesh-and-bones human company.

I'm not sure this dichotomy isn't false. I can enjoy the best restaurants a city has to offer without Instagram having anything to do with it, and research doesn't preclude me from having flesh-and-bones company. There may be a good argument for not doing research, but I don't think these are it.

Possibly. I'm alluding to the spiritual disposition that expects 4.97 stars or bust. In relationship terms this often maps to expecting the perfect dinner company. When the actual company disappointingly fails to meet that standard, they are summarily dismissed, and the whole experience turns into superficial theater of appearances.

Yeah, that's definitely a phenomenon that can be harmful, as you describe. Still, this seems to be going from one extreme to the other. I guess "everything in moderation" is good advice here too.

How would you like to specify your constraints? We are working on this exact problem (not there yet).

Did you also use help from LLMs in coding this app instead of just coding it all by hand? Just curious.

I am finding myself reaching for GPT4 more often to spin up POC apps.

You could fine-tune a coding assistant on your library and good quality example apps with documentation ... and that might take the ease of churning out new demos and apps to the next level?

Exactly. I'm using gpt4 more than copilot as of today. I just keep adding more info and get it to write the code that I cp.

I ask it to write it in small chuncks but in the same context. I sometimes have to remind it to refer back to decisions we made earlier.

Excellent work. Do you envision this more for data science work, or can this be used for building general purpose webapp?

It can be used for general purposes, but we focus on the data science landscape. However, our main website is built using solara, and we know a few startups using solara for their main product (public-facing, not internal).

Can you give examples?

Solara looks like an interesting Python webapp framework. Any differentiation w r t Streamlit ?

On https://solara.dev/docs/tutorial/streamlit we highlight the main differences:

* Solara will not continuously re-execute your script as Streamlit does.

* Solara will re-execute components instead, only what needs to. * State in Solara is separate from the UI components, unlike streamlit, where they are strongly linked.

* State can be on the application level (global) for simplicity or on the component level (local) for creating reusable components.

* Solara should not block the render loop. Long-running functions should be executed in a thread using use_thread.

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