Or, and hear me out here, you go to the existing site or app which sells concert tickets, press the purchase button, and then you have your tickets.
Like what are we even doing here...
Like what are we even doing here...
A related fallacy is that great things are easier to build when you can rapidly create stuff. That isn't really how great ideas are generated, it's not a slot machine where if you pull the lever 1000 times you generate a good idea and thus a successful piece of software can be made. This seems like a distinctly Silicon Valley, SFBA type mentality. Steve Jobs didn't invent the iPhone by creating 1000 different throwaway products to test the market. Etc etc.
Well, if you lower the competence bar required to do something, then more people of lower competence will do that thing.
It's harder to buy one plane ticket for the lowest cost amongst all the different ways that plane tickets can be bought, and harder yet to do so with a lack of specificity.
So, for instance: Maybe I don't have a firm plan. Maybe I'm very flexible.
Maybe all I want to do is say "Hey, bot. I want to go visit my friend in Florida sometime in the next couple of weeks and spend a few days there as inexpensively as I can. He's in Orlando. I can fly out of Detroit or Cleveland; all the same to me. If I drive to the airport myself, I'll need a place to keep my car at or near the airport. I also want to explore renting a car in Orlando. I pack light; personal bag only. Cattle class is OK, but I prefer a window seat. Present to me a list of the cheapest options, with itinerary."
That's all stuff that a human can sort out, but it takes time to manually fudge around dates and locations and deal with different systems and tabulate the results. And there's nuances that need covered, like parking at DTW is weird: It's all off-site, and it can be cheaper and better to rent a room for one night in a nearby hotel that includes long-term parking than to pay for parking by itself.
So the hypothetical bot does a bunch of API hits, applies its general knowledge of how things flow, and comes back with a list of verified-good options for me to review. And then I get to pick around that list, and ask questions, and mold it to best fit my ideal vision of an inexpensive trip to go spend time with a friend.
In English, and without ever dealing with any travel websites myself.
"Right. So I go to Detroit on Tuesday and check in at the hotel any time after noon, and take the free shuttle to the airport the next morning at around 0400 to the Evans terminal. Also, thanks for pointing out that this airport is like a ghost town until 0600 and I might want to bring a snack. Anyway, I get on the flight, land at Orlando, and they'll have a cheap car waiting for me at Avis. This will all cost me a total of $343, which sounds great. If that's all I need to know right now, then make it so. Pay for it and put it on my calendar."
(And yeah, this is a problem that I actually have from time to time. I'd love to have a bot that could just sort this stuff out with a few paragraphs.)
What you describe will just end up a feature on Expedia. The highly technical builders of stuff that love to tinker vastly overestimate how much BS the general public will put up with
I didn't address that concept at all above, but I think the notion of a million people each independently using the bot to write a million bespoke programs that each do the same things is...kind of a non-starter. It's something that can only happen in some weird reality where software isn't essentially free to copy, and where people are motivated neither by laziness, nor the size of their pocketbook.
If/when someone does put the work into getting it to happen, then I expect to find it on Github for people to lazily copy and use, or for them to make it available as a website or app for anybody to use (with even more laziness) -- and for them to monetize it.
One of the benefits that I see is as much as I love tech and writing software, I really really do not want to interface with a vast majority of the internet that has been designed to show the maximum amount of ads in the given ad space.
The internet sucks now, anything that gets me away from having ads shoved in my face constantly and surrounded by uncertainty that you could always be talking to a bot.
But if the LLM needed to write bespoke code to buy the tickets or whatever, it could just do it without needing to get you involved.
- You have to work; you can't stay online all day waiting for the tickets to go on sale
- You have your agent watch for when the tickets go on sale
- Because the agent has its own wallet, it spends the 6 hours waiting for the tickets to go on sale and buys them for you
- Your agent informs you via SMS, iMessage, email, Telegram or whatever messaging platform of your choice
Yes agentic wallets are a thing now [1].
[1]: https://x.com/CoinbaseDev/status/2023893470725947769?s=20
Or not, because other 7 billion agents were also waiting for it.
Endless queues, scalpers grabbing tickets within a second. Having to wait days/weeks periodically checking to see if a ticket is available.
The only platform I’m aware of that does guarantee a ticket can be purchased if available is Dice once you join a wait list. You get given a reasonable time to purchase it in too.
So I can see why people would prefer to defer this to an agent and not care about the implementation, I personally would. In the past I’ve been able to script notifications for it for myself and can see more people benefiting from it.
It’s like we usually say: companies should focus on their core value. And typically the ui/ux is not the core value of companies.
Huh? The user experience is basically ALL of the core product of a company.
If it's so easy for an AI to create ticket purchasing software that people can generate it themselves, then it's also true that the company can also use AI to generate that software for users who then don't need to generate it themselves. Obviously I think neither of these things are true or likely to happen.
Thats the case now, but I think it’s because there’s no other way around it nowadays. But if agents in the future provide a better or more natural ui/ux for many use cases, then companies core value will shift more into their inner core (which in software translates typically to the domain model)
> If it's so easy for an AI to create ticket purchasing software that people can generate it themselves, then it's also true that the company can also use AI to generate that software for users who then don't need to generate it themselves.
I think the generation of software per se will be transparent to the user. Users won’t think in terms of software created but wishes their agents make true.