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Comment by nickthegreek | Hacker News Reader

How is everyone having a personal shopper a problem of scale? I was going to shop myself, but I sent someone else to do it for me.

At this moment I am using Perplexity's Comet browser to take a spotify playlist and add all the tracks to my youtube music playlist. I love it.

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We'll see more of this sort of thing as AI agents become more popular and capable. They will do things that the site or app should be able to do (or rather, things that users want to be able to do) but don't offer. The YouTube music playlist is a good example. One thing I'd like to be able to do is make a playlist of some specific artists. But you can't. You have to select specific songs.

If sites want to avoid people using agents, they should offer the functionality that people are using the agents to accomplish.

Let's look at the opposite benefit to a store if a mom that would need to bring her 3 kids to the store vs that mom having a personal shopper. In this case, the personal shopper is "better" for the store as far as physical space. However, I'm sure the store would still rather have the mom and 3 kids physically in the store so that the kids can nag mom into buying unneeded items that are placed specifically to attract those kids' attention.

>o that the kids can nag mom into buying unneeded items

Excellent. Personal shoppers are 'adblock for IRL'.

>You owe the companies nothing. You especially don't owe them any courtesy. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don't even start asking for theirs.

I didn't use the word "problem". In fact I presented no opinion at all. I'm just pointing out that scale matters a lot. In fact, in tech, it's often the only thing that matters. It's naive (or narrative) to think it doesn't.

Everyone having a personal shopper obviously changes the relationship to the products and services you use or purchase via personal shopper. Good, bad, whatever.

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