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Comment by levocardia | Hacker News Reader

Very obviously missing the mundane agentic work. I think the following things are basically already solved, and are just waiting for the right harness:

- Call this government service center, wait on hold for 45 minutes, then when they finally answer, tell them to reactivate my insurance marketplace account that got wrongly deleted.

- Find a good dentist within 2mi from my house, call them to make sure they take my insurance, and book an appointment sometime in the next two weeks no earlier than 11am

- Figure out how I'm going to get from Baltimore to Boston next Thursday, here's $100 and if you need more, ask me.

- I want to apply a posterizing filter in photoshop, take control of my mouse for the next 10sec and show me where it is in the menu

- Call that gym I never go to and cancel my membership

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> Figure out how I'm going to get from Baltimore to Boston next Thursday, here's $100 and if you need more, ask me.

I tried something like this last month. I was going on a holiday and asked LLM to prepare a sightseeing guide on a fixed budget. The LLMs plan looked feasible unless you looked closer.

The first issue was the opening/closing times of certain attractions. It kept saying stuff like - "At 6pm you can go and visit place X". While in reality X closed at 5pm.

Second issue was underestimating the walking speed/distance. The plans were often fully packed with lots of walking. Now without a Google maps guidance it often underestimated the time. Instead of say 10 mins between A and B it routinely underestimated the time to be 5-6 mins.

I keep prompting it go back and check the opening hours. And once it took that into account the walking routes became complicated- often double backing to same location. Lots of prompts and re-prompts to get it right.

So, I don't know if this is already solved - at least at scale and within costs - especially given the token costs.

> - Find a good dentist within 2mi from my house, call them to make sure they take my insurance, and book an appointment sometime in the next two weeks no earlier than 11am

The web caused dentists to make websites, but they don't post their appointment calendar; they don't have to.

Will AI looking for appointments cause businesses to post live, structured data (like calendars)? The complexity of scheduling and multiple calendars is perfect for an AI solution. What other AI uses and interactive systems will come soon?

- Accounting: generate balance sheets, audit in real-time, and have human accountants double check it (rather than doing)

- Correspondence: create and send notifications of all sorts, and consume them

- Purchase selection: shifting the lack of knowledge about products in the customers favor

- Forms: doing taxes or applying for a visa

The problem is that we're reverting back to the stone age by throwing unnecessary resources at problems that have a simple and effective solution: open, standardised, and accessible APIs.

We wouldn't need to use an expensive (compute-wise) AI agent to do things like making appointments. Especially if in the end you'd end up with bots talking to bots anyway. The digital equivalent of always up-to-date yellow pages would solve many of these issues. Super simple and "dumb" but reliable programs could perform such tasks.

Scheduling multiple calendars doesn't require "AI" - it's a comparatively simple optimisation problem that can be solved using computationally cheap existing algorithms. It seems more and more to me that AI - and LLMs in particular - are the hammer and now literally everything looks like a nail...

I have doubts the nontechnical users/general public will be able to articulate what they need at this level of detail. Things like "account that got wrongly deleted" still implies that the person making the call understands the internals/bad implementation of healthcare or has the capability to discover it.

The HN audience has argued with LLMs enough to know the level of detail they need to make meaningful progress (or when too many details leads it down rabbit holes).

Basically already solved = you've never used it for any of those purposes and have no idea if or how well would they work?

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