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Comment by patchorang | Hacker News Reader

"As consumers begin to use AI agents to do their shopping..." are people actually doing this? Has anyone here done this?

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Great question - similarly, I've seen posts recently (Fly.io's comes to mind) where people are talking about how "swarms of AI agents are using our service".

I'd love to learn more about what that actually means - does that mean tool usage from LLMs? Cursor agentic mode? Command-line hints for how to do a deploy?

We're entering an era where PR/the press is talking a lot about "AI agents" and I'm not sure that fully matches with the reality of what's going on out there en masse (at the moment).

I would if I didn't think people on the selling side were paying to get in my shopping basket. In that case, it feels like it would be too easy to get ripped off. Knowing how the world works that is exactly what will happen.

I would.

Me: "Chuck and Lisa are coming over tonight with the kids. Find me a recipe for dinner they'll all like and have the ingredients delivered in time for me to make it. Remind me to turn on the pellet grill if we're using it."

It: "It looks like it's going to be a beautiful afternoon. How about reverse seared tri-tip? There's a sale at FoodMerchant..."

This is a deceptively difficult problem. Food is incredibly messy -- grocery delivery is very far from being a solved problem even with a human in the loop. You have to deal with stockouts and sensible replacements, and driver/picker error, and quality variance. Quality variance is a huge issue in perishable categories and a major reason why foodtech is tremendously difficult (and fun, IMO).

Simple quality variance examples: banana ripeness. Or size of items that can only be ordered by each instead of by lb. Or one of the two onions you needed looking mostly fine on the outside but rotten on the inside.

As an experiment, try ordering all the ingredients to make a specific recipe several days in a row. You'll tend to hit an failure rate between 15-30%. That failure rate is usually fine if you're just restocking for home -- you can always pick up milk/sugar/whatever tomorrow -- but it's pretty awful if it means that something like 1 in 5 of your dinner plans are ruined or you have to leave your guests to rush to the store to pick up some missing ingredient

Also: the LLM will need to be aware of your home inventory, unless you're fine with it ordering lots ingredients you already have

So there's lots of hidden complexity here. If they turn this on, it will be a fun party trick that will work once in a while, but getting burned with ruined plans causes people to churn out fast.

all you've done is outline a series of mildly tricky but completely solvable problems to a use case that most humans would find incredibly useful. its very strange that you cant extrapolate 5 years down the line and see that this is completely reasonable.

Underestimation of the problem space is why foodtech is a tarpit for tech companies. Many have tried and failed to solve these very problems over decades. I don't blame you, to a green outsider the food industry seems like it would be simple, but the devil is in the details. I'd love for you to prove me wrong though

None of this is to say that LLMs have nothing to offer here. There would still be value in being able to tell an agent "Here's my list, get this ordered for me". But being able to say "find me a recipe for dinner that my guests will like and have the ingredients delivered in time for me to make it" without getting burned every other time is actually a much harder problem.

I tend to agree with you overall. Think about a small case study with avocados; what’s the confidence level you could order 3 avocados that you need to use for a recipe upon delivery and that you’d be satisfied with the quality and ripeness level? I’d put it at probably 20%, which means it’s a non-starter.

Literally tonight I ordered heavy whipping cream, strawberries, and biscuits from Doordash's dashmart store to make strawberry shortcakes, having forgotten about this thread. Until I saw the whipping cream was puffy and expired nearly a month ago. Haha

10lbs of ribs ordered at the pickup only bbq shop an hour away. 20 gallons of coleslaw ordered from another place delivered to your old address. It sent an improper command to your smoker which is now targeting 900F for the next 20 hours. Perfect for your party of eight people.

Don't get me wrong, I truly agree there will probably be a point things will be an agentic future. The same chain of events could have been said about booking travel arrangements a couple of decades ago. But until the rest of meatspace actually moves towards those things being normal these things are still in the realm of fantasy on average.

what makes you think this isnt completely reasonable to accomplish in 5 years?

Did I give a number? I just said "until the rest of meatspace actually moves towards those things being normal". Is that next year? 5 years? A decade? More? I don't know. But it's not going to be normal tomorrow, I'm pretty certain of that.

"I told you Lisa has celiac."

"I apologize for any misunderstanding. How about an entire loaf of sourdough?"

I realize you probably wrote that yourself, but that apology is way too short. You're also missing the context where the previous recommendation was the same sourdough.

Yeah, fair. I figured I'd avoid burning down some rainforest for a joke.

Buying, absolutely not. But I could see a use case of describing your requirements to a product in natural language and it searches matching products and finds places to get them. So using the AI for the thing it's good at: transforming natural language. And not for what it's bad at: making reliable decisions.

I have tried to ask Chat GPT to do "shopping research" for me. I think this is a viable thing. But the actual shopping I want to do myself.

I use AI to explain brand options in spaces I'm not well versed in (for example, I don't really know how to trust Home Depot's positioning of certain brands, and I just don't trust their store purchasing teams as much as I trust Costcos or Targets). It does OK. It gives me a list that I can branch out and Google from.

I had two friends give their credit cards to ai agents nearly a year ago and were flabbergasted that anyone else in the group wasn’t immediately hyped to adopt the technology, much less have a problem with it

what do the agents purchase?

Pizza and shit on Amazon from what I recall. They had some belief that any mistakes “would be fixed” with no further explanation or really ability to even respond to further questioning on who would be doing the fixing, why they would be fixing a mistake caused by someone else’s complete lack of fear of risks, or how that “fix” would mechanically function

Yes, I use LLMs to help me buy gifts for friends. It works really well. You type in their personality and interests and a price range and you get several good ideas.

Scalpers?

"As consumers begin to use the AI shopping agents we will create for them using AI coding assistants" - says the AI agent writing the article.

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