There are real, impressive examples of the power of agentic flows out there. Can we up the quality of our examples just a bit?
This AI wave is filled with "ideas guys/gals" who thought they had an amazing awesome idea and if only they knew how to program they could make a best-selling billion dollar idea, being confronted with the reality that their ideas are really uninteresting as well.
They're still happy to write blog posts about how their bleeding-edge Claw setup sends them a push notification whenever someone comments on one of their LinkedIn posts, though.
"What a great idea! This will revolutionize linkedin commenting. Let's implement it together."
Half the reason the dominant UX is a "Chat" is that's the only way to provide a facsimile of memory or persistence across requests. Append the last few turns, press go. Over time you can develop an eye for the model's tics/attractor topics.
Remember that they bill by token use, and suddenly, the entire UX/architecture starts making sense.
Ask a question, it will say yes, ask "are you sure?", it will reverse direction full throttle, then ask are you sure again and it'll go back to initial response saying "yeah I confused myself there". You can do this until context window exhaustion and this will never stop.
On the other side of this, Gemini will stand by whatever it generated the first time, no matter how much you push back and no matter how stupid the idea is.
It won't even help you understand that the 20 second task you've been putting off for 6 months causing anxiety will only take 20 seconds (nor will we learn from this)
It has unironically saved me a lot of time I would have otherwise spent going down rabbit holes.
Of the models I've found that claude doesn't gas you up as much as GPT, so for stuff like this where the answer can be "no, that's not a good idea" I usually use claude.
The biggest limitation here is data access though. A lot of market data is gated behind registration or anti-bot captchas, so the project that my CC is working on now is a playwright clone that is not easily detectable + can be used with CLI same as playwright itself.
I find a company that actually built a solid product, dangit this is really good. They appear to have executed well, but they failed, or went nowhere, heck the app is still out there. Maybe they are even chugging along but its a smaller business even with a better product than I would have been able to build. Had I been a founder of the product, I would be questioning staying.
Then I also find sometimes I was doing it all wrong and the world has moved past my notions of products. I think there's a market opportunity because I don't realize that the rest of the world is already cool using a $15 plant hygrometer bluetooth device which can also keep track of your medicine or food in your cooler, my notion of the value of something is skewed by western costs
So being an entrepreneur would never work for me.
That was adjusted for 80s. In todays world you can know whether something is worth pursuing in minutes. Tip - in 99.9% of cases its not, but you will still learn along the way. Maybe you find something new.
I'm happy for the voice assistant to add stuff to my grocery list, though. The consequences are not serious if it screws up a letter or something.
I wouldn't remotely trust a software assistant to deal with all that misdirection autonomously, but I guess I'd be prepared to give it a chance collating options with tolerable time and cost, attempting to make the price include the stuff that has to be added to preserve health, sanity and a modicum of human dignity.
Everything has one or more upsells. Dark patterns are now nominal practice. Quality has gone to shit.
Can't wait for agents to handle all of it.
We already have agents for this if you really want to avoid it, they're called travel agents. They're pretty good at complex travel booking and not very expensive.
I just booked a round trip for myself, plus two more flights for quicker hops while I'm away, and I didn't spend much time on it at all. I just looked at Google flights, picked the flights I wanted, and then ended up buying them through Chase with points. Chase's travel website is among the worst I've ever used, but it wasn't hard. Then I went to the airline's website and changed my seats (Chase doesn't know I have status and couldn't directly book the seats I wanted) and did an upgrade for one of the legs using miles I had at the airline. Half hour of work, maybe?
The price-setting algorithms are garbage, but an LLM isn't going to fix that.
Agree with the other sibling posters that if this annoys you so much, you should just call up a human travel agent. I haven't used one in many years, but when I did (mostly for business travel), it was always pleasant, and the agent knew my preferences and took care of things if there were any snags or changes needed. At the time, they usually got me flights cheaper than if I were to book them myself, even with their fee on top.
But I do wonder what the profession is like now. I can imagine some sort of website where you often don't even deal with the same person, who won't get to know your preferences and will be sort of like a customer service agent, just trying to close as many cases as fast as they can. But hopefully there are still smaller shops around, where you can talk to the same person (either phone or email) every time. Dunno.
But in general I do agree: flight bookings are something I want to do myself, because even I don't fully know my preferences when it comes to timing and price until I see what's available. And in general I don't find it all that difficult to do. A couple days ago I booked a multi-city travel itinerary with four different destinations, and it took me about a half hour?
Sure, if an LLM can do that in under a minute, that would be cool, but in absolutely zero situations would I not need to check its work, and if it did get it wrong, I'd have to do it all myself anyway.
The best value of "AI" there is making a shortlist of best alternatives, which is just a Google Flights UX improvement. It's not like your own little agent would have good enough access to the underlying data, gatekeeping that is worth money.
Morning Briefing: - it reads all my new email (multiple accounts and contexts), calendars (same accounts and contexts), slack (and other chat) messages (multiple slacks, matrix, discord, and so on), the weather reports, my open/closed recent to dos in a shared list across all my devices, my latest journal/log entries of things done. Has access for cross referencing to my "people files" to get context on mails/appointments and chat messages.
From all this, as well as my RSS feeds, it generates a comprehensive yet short-ish morning briefing I receive on weekdays at 7am.
Two minutes and I have a good grasp of my day, important meetings/deadlines/to dos, possible scheduling conflicts across the multiple calendars (that are not syncable due to corporate policies). This is a very high level overview that already enables me to plan my day better, reschedule things if necessary. And start the day focused on my most important open tasks/topics. More often than not this enables me to keep the laptop closed and do the conceptual work first without getting sucked into email. Or teams.
By the way: Sadly teams is not accessible to it right now. MS Power Automate sadly does not enable forwarding the content of chats. Unlike with emails or calendar appointments.
Just for that alone it is worth having it to me. YMMV.
I also can fire a research request via chat. It does that and writes the results into a file that gets synced to my other devices. Meaning I have it available at any device within a minute or so. Really handy sometimes. It also runs a few regular research tasks on a schedule. And a bit of prep work for copy writing and stuff like this.
Currently it is just a hobby/play project. But the morning briefing to me is easily worth an hour of my day. Totally worth running it on my infra without additional costs.
Doesn't this sorta defeat those policies though? Now all of your calendars are "synced" to a random unvalidated AI agent.
Intelligence agencies are really heading into a golden age, with everyone syncing all the data they have to the cloud, in plaintext. I mean it was already bad, but it's somehow getting worse.
I want to setup agent to clean up my gmail inbox which has many thousands of unread messages.
The way I do it is every morning we go through recent emails in my inbox one at a time. If I want to mark it as spam, delete it, add it to my calendar, whatever, I explain to the agent why in detail. Over time it builds up an understanding of how I handle a lot of things, it needs to show me less and less, and it handles more and more on its own.
I also told the assistant to check my email on its own once per hour and auto-action what it can. That helps keep junk from building up, and it alerts me via SMS if something high priority shows up (e.g. user reporting a bug).
Point is there was never a point where it just ran for a long time and magically cleaned everything up just how I'd have wanted. I have like 7k emails in my inbox, that wouldn't be practical. But the number is going down now gradually, instead of up. I've had a chance to teach it and let it establish trust that it's doing things the right way. Which feels safer.
How do you ensure that it's not hallucinating stuff, or ignoring something important?
In the spirit of CLIs being easy on your tokens:
https://pnp.github.io/cli-microsoft365/cmd/teams/chat/chat-g...
Use the JSON responses for full detail including e.g. reactions.
Composio, behind the blog post, offers "Enterprise" pricing, and has no Teams examples. A stat HN ignores: 85% of SMBs are on M365, not Google Workspace and Slack.
You can pick winners and losers in a segment early, by whether they treat M365 as a first class platform or pretend it doesn't exist. Check for the "Continue with Microsoft" button or support for OIDC not just SAML+SCIM, as well as examples for Teams.
This isn't just true for YC classes, holds true for unicorns. Compare Anthropic's "Claude in Excel" and "Claude in PowerPoint" instead of in Google Docs or Sheets, and guess which firm has a better grasp of how business works outside the valley. And yeah, Claude in Chrome works in Edge (and the lack of just renaming and posting Claude in Edge for normals to find is an ANTHROP\C miss).
Do I want the AI Agent to take my bank account and automatically pay some bill every month in full? What if you go a little over that month due to an emergency expense you weren't prepared for? And it's not a matter of "I don't have enough in my bank account for this one time charge", but it's "I don't have enough in my bank account for this charge and 3 others coming at the end of the month." type deal.
Agents aren't going to be very good at that. "Hey I paid $3,000 on your credit card in order to prevent you from incurring interest. Interest is really bad to carry on a credit card and you should minimize that as much as possible." Me: "Yeah but I needed that money for rent this month." Agent: "Oh, yeah! I should have taken that into account! It looks like we can't reverse the charge for the payment."
Yeah, no fucking thank you LOL.
Also this supposed use case is called "Autopay" and requires zero AI. A lot of people still don't use it. Even when it includes a discount!
Scheduling in a larger org and/or with multiple equally busy people is a non-trivial, complex task; it makes sense to dedicate resources to the task. Good Executive Assistants are generally fairly smart folks, in my experience.
When the scale is substantially more and involves objects as well it evolves into multi-million $ ERM (Enterprise Resource Management) systems.
Trying to do more is a losing game, and AI assistants just paper over that. We all have finite time and attention. I think a pragmatic engineering approach is the right one here: consider that as a non-negotiable constraint, a fact of the physical world, not something to magic away.
Software is pretty good. It remembers everything, perfectly, forever. It will never forget to remind you of something. It can give you directions, sort your emails by how important they are, help you find shops and restaurants. The only people busy enough to warrant an actual human doing that stuff are executives. And, even then, I think for most of them it's an ego thing, not an "I need this" thing.
Software isn't as faultless as you suggest. The default alarm app on my phone occasionally fails to go off (not an issue with Silent Mode or DND).
> The only people busy enough to warrant an actual human doing that stuff are executives.
Life is short. It is absolutely worthwhile to spend as little time doing trivial work if possible, and avoid decision fatigue on unimportant decisions. We are nowhere close to the usefulness of a secretary in our devices.
I'm guessing this is an iPhone, and yeah it's because that software is just bad. I've helped my Mom try to get her phone to ring, like, 12 times now and I've failed each time. And I'm a dev! So, point taken.
> Life is short. It is absolutely worthwhile to spend as little time doing trivial work if possible, and avoid decision fatigue on unimportant decisions.
Ehh, I kind of disagree. The work is the same, at best it shifts to something else. Asking for more productivity is a monkey paw. Best to just take it all in and try to enjoy the simple joys of life. Or, uh, work.
I think the reason for this is labor cost, and "good enough". I don't think a smartphone is an equivalent replacement for a dedicated assistant. The average mid-level manager who would have had an assistant 30 years ago likely (today) spends more time on "assistant-y" work than they would if they had an assistant today. It's just that now they do 30% of the work the assistant did, and their phone handles the other 60%. That kind of ratio is enough to make upper management believe that human assistants for the lower-level folks isn't worth the cost. (While they themselves of course still have human assistants.)
This is not a true statement and never was. Bitrot is real
Now AI can provide a simulacrum of his fondest aspiration, to be too important to click through booking.com and make someone else do it for him.
there aren't, and just like the blockchain "industry" with its "surely this is going to be the killer app" we're going to be in this circus until the money dries up.
Just like the note-taking craze, the crypto ecosystem and now AI there's an almost inverse relation between the people advocating it and actually doing any meaningful work. The more anyone's pushing it the faster you should run into the opposite direction.
1. Semi-private blockchains, where you can rely on an actor not to be actively malicious, but still want to be able to cryptographically hold them to a past statement (think banks settling up with each other)
2. NFTs for tracking physical products through a logistics supply chain. Every time a container moves from one node to the next in a physical logistics chain (which includes tons of low trust "last mile" carriers), its corresponding NFT changes ownership as well. This could become as granular as there's money to support.
These would both provide material advantages above and beyond a centralized SQL database as there's no obvious central party that is trusted enough to operate that database. Neither has anything to do with retail investors or JPEGs though, so they'll never moon and you'll never hear about them.
[0] https://www.reuters.com/markets/australian-stock-exchanges-b...
[1] https://mediacenter.ibm.com/media/Farmer+Connect+%2B+IBM/1_8...
FWIW if you know anything about the ASX, you'll know that the failure was a result of the people running the ASX and not necessarily the tech behind it.
Writing that I feel back in 2021.
At least with card networks, there are layers of liability if solvency issues occur. There’s merchant protections from the acquiring bank and if for some reason the acquiring bank fails there is the guarantee of the card network.
On the issuing side there are chargebacks. I hate chargebacks as much as the next startup bro but consumer protections are a necessary aspect of a functioning payment rail. There are reasons we don’t use ACH for everything.
I think hand waving the pesky settlement details is absurd. The settlement process is the payment rail.
If you do want those protections you end up back with a custodial wallet, which brings us back to a centralized model.
I’m not arguing crypto doesn’t have its place in the universe, I am arguing it’s a very bad payments product.
Maybe we don’t need an alternative when Visa handles everything, but it might be nice to not pay a 3% markup on everything. Alternatively, we could try to be more like India and Brazil, which each built instant bank to bank transfer setups you can use at the grocery store, without the risks that come with losing debit/credit cards. Convenient without poor people with no rewards cards subsidizing everyone else to cover Visa’s take.
Well the reason that works is because in grocery stores you have a concept of card present so the liability shifts to the issuing bank... so there are no chargebacks. Concepts like card present and card not present demand a centralized authority and really can't exist in a decentralized payment rail, unless you're going to somehow invent decentralized pos hardware for merchants. Once you enter the world of atoms, you have re-introduced centralized trust into your payment rail though.
> Convenient without poor people with no rewards cards subsidizing everyone else to cover Visa’s take.
I fully agree. This is a crappy part of ccs and the best remedy is to disallow rewards programs for credit products. This isn't a fault of the card networks its a fault of issuing banks (and the airlines). Every crypto company in 2021 was offering 8% APY, you think those guys would have been better about this than Amex?
> Maybe we don’t need an alternative when Visa handles everything, but it might be nice to not pay a 3% markup on everything.
I'm actually not bothered by a take from the banks and networks involved. They are underwriting risk and affording insurances to me and the merchant. I guess my main argument is that it's good to have centralized insurance in money transfer facilitation. 3% is high and a failure of Dodd Frank. The Durbin Amendment should have reigned in cc fees and not just focused on debit interchange.
> Alternatively, we could try to be more like India and Brazil, which each built instant bank to bank transfer setups you can use at the grocery store, without the risks that come with losing debit/credit cards.
I don't disagree. As you pointed out it really comes down to the crappy reward programs from the issuing banks that make merchants and poor people suffer.
I don't mind crypto as an idea. I don't have a horse in the crypto race either. What I mind is the notion that it is somehow a viable payment rail. I'm sorry, it's been 20 years and crypto's best use case for payments has been buying acid on the internet because it was the only payment option.
I think one of the most interesting business stories in the world is about the guy who invented the Visa network, Dee Hock. It truly is a story of decentralization at its finest. John Coogan did a great video on him a couple of years ago I highly recommend: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RNbi2cUZt1o.
Think it through. How do you actually "cryptographically hold" someone to anything? You take them to court.
Guess what you can do, right now, without the blockchain? That's right, you can take them to court.
You're just reinventing normal contract law with extra steps.
The cryptographic part doesn't even help you when you can just say in court that "here are our records that show we gave them these packages, here are our records of customers filing complaints that they never got them" and that is completely fine.
With or without blockchain you end up at court. If you build a decentralized trust system, the builder of the system needs to be trusted. If you want to use decentralized trust to do your taxes or other government communication you still need to trust your government. These are all actual examples i’ve encountered.
You pretty much always end up at the legal system. If there js anything to make big impact on it would be that. But that requires world-wide revolution.
The thing to keep in mind is that replacing a database with computationally expensive crypto is sub-optimal. Supply Chain tracking falls into this category: why crypto over barcodes and a database?
Governments use Banks with their deterministic processes to manage and guarantee transactions. This is where crypto shines- replacing the entire banking system as an intermediary to manage and guarantee transactions. Crypto can do this better and cheaper than Banks.
There are other domains where the government is the backstop/guarantor and leverages intermediaries to manage the scale. Real Estate comes to mind. Identity is another. Crypto can be useful there.
One last useful crypto application is to replace governments themselves as the backstop and final/guarantor for transactions.
These are ideas that evoke strong reactions. There's a reason the inventor of crypto is anonymous, to this day.
- A photo sharing app will change restaurants, public spaces, and the entire travel industry across the world
- The smartphone will bring about regime change in Egypt, Tunisia, Lebanon, and other countries in ~4 years
- We'll replace taxis and hotels by getting rides and sharing homes with strangers
- Billions of people across the world will never need to own a desktop or laptop
- A short video sharing app will kill TV
- QR codes become relevant
Most of these would be a hard sell at the time.
I think the smart phone revolution is actually pretty overstated. It basically only made computers cheaper and handier to carry (but also more walled gardens). There are a few capabilities of smart phones we do today which we didn’t with do with computers and mobile phones back in 2007, such as navigation (GPS were a thing but not used much by the general public).
Your case would be much stronger if you’d use the World Wide Web as your analogy, as in 1995 it would by hard to convince anybody how important it would be to maintain a web presence. And nobody would guess a social media like the irc would blow up into something other then a toy.
However I think the analogy with smartphones are actually more apt, this AI revolution has made statistical models more accessible, but we are only using them for things we were already capable of before, and unlike the web, and much like smartphones, I don’t think that will actually change. But unlike smartphones, it will always be cheaper and often even easier to use the alternatives.
In the late 90s we'd print out directions from MapQuest. That was a game-changer. Still no GPS, though.
As an adult in the early 00s, I was still printing out MapQuest maps. In 2004 I got a car with a built-in navigation system! (Complete with a DVD drive in the trunk with a disc holding the maps.) It was still incredibly uncommon; I was one of the few people I knew who had one. I did know a few people who had Garmin GPS devices that they'd suction-cup to their windshield, but not many.
By 2007 most people were aware of GPS devices with little screens that you could bring into the car, though I'd guess maybe 25% of the drivers I knew then had one.
If your dad was bringing a laptop with a GPS dongle in the car in the 90s, I think you were very unusual. Hell, I didn't even have a laptop until 2004, and even then it was a hand-me-down from my dad's work. And I was in my 20s by then!
I however did not see this technology coming to our phones, and becoming this commonplace.
It has been a day since I wrote the upthread post, and navigation is still the only novel capability of smartphones, which I think would have been a hard sell in 2007. I really can‘t think of another example.
Booking, boarding, change/gate notifications, rebooking options, customs and immigration is done via phone.
Transit to/from the airport via Uber or a transit pass stored in your smartphone wallet.
Baggage tracking via airtags
Yeah, there's vague precedents for this stuff from the desktop computer era, but it only _really_ works when you've got an internet-connected device in your pocket.
The others you mentions, I would argue against. Yes it is convenient to order a taxi via an app on your phone, but in 2007 you could do so via SMS or a phone call, so not much has change really other then we now have one more interface to pick from.
I don’t see how smartphones have changed rebooking, nor customs, and especially not immigration which has become 100x more of a headache then it was in 2007. And finally, airtags are a separate technology from smartphones.
2007: arrive in a new city, figure out who to call (or maybe text) for that particular city, wait, hope someone will pick you up and understand enough of your language and the local geography to get you where you want to go, possibly some unpleasant haggling over the fare
2026: arrive in a new city/country, open Uber, specify in the app precisely where you want to go, choose a vehicle, when to get picked up, etc, track vehicle progress in real-time, up-front pricing
And that's the consumer side. The provider side was even more radically changed.
If you don't see how smartphones changed the experience of flying... maybe you don't fly anywhere?
Airtags are entirely dependent on the ubiquity of smartphones.
Your ride sharing experience sound more like you would expect from any consumer product gaining a global market share (or even monopoly). 1980 - Arrive in a new city and not knowing how to get a hamburger. 2000 - Arrive in a new city, find the nearest McDonalds and get your usual BigMac.
This is actually something we should be a little uncomfortable about. It's a fine example of monopolists at work. The convenience does come with downsides.
I do like it, though, for exactly the reasons you state. If I end up in a country with cabbies who generally have good English skills and aren't out to rip me off, it's fine, and often easier to take a taxi. But you never know until you get there, and that can be stressful. The consistent Uber/Lyft experience is a breath of fresh air after a long flight when you just want to get to your lodging and pass out.
> If you don't see how smartphones changed the experience of flying... maybe you don't fly anywhere?
Eh, I'm not convinced. Sure, it's changed, but the general paradigm is the same. The main big change is the mobile boarding pass, seamlessly delivered after checking in on your phone, which is a genuine improvement. (But so many airlines still require you to check in with a human at the airport for international travel.) Print-at-home does come close enough, though, and still means you avoid lines at kiosks or (gasp) waiting for a real person to print you a boarding pass. Some airlines now charge you to print out your boarding pass (because of the availability of mobile passes), and that's disgusting. (I know people who still insist on printing at home, because they've had bad experiences around their boarding passes refusing to load, app crashing at exactly the wrong time, etc.)
Yes, all the airlines have apps, though after traveling a bit in Central America and in the Balkans recently, I've found that some airline apps are absolute trash, worse than having to wait in line for an hour to talk to a person. Most of my digital interaction with the airline is done on my laptop before the trip anyway. Notifications about gate information or delays are useful, but a push notification from an app is not markedly better than an SMS, and either way I always feel like I need to verify on a physical departures board, especially if connection timing is tight.
In instances where my flight has been delayed or cancelled, it's definitely an improvement to be able to rebook in the app, instead of waiting in line to talk to someone, or getting on the phone with the airline (or both, as I'd usually do, to find out which would resolve the problem faster).
I've never used airtags (don't have an iPhone anyway); I've checked bags at most twice in the past 20 years when I had no other choice (my mantra: checked luggage is lost luggage). But even considering that, I feel like all the fuss people make about airtagging their luggage is overblown.
Some airlines have eliminated seat-back entertainment and expect you to use your phone. That's crap.
Meanwhile, as GP has pointed out, security, customs, immigration have all gotten worse. Boarding processes have not improved, food hasn't gotten better, and airplane seat comfort has gone down. I say this not to blame smartphones, but to suggest that there are other, more important problems with air travel that have nothing to do with phones.
Who stops and looks for a physical departures board in 2026? I already know the gate I'm going to because I've had ample time to check my smartphone while I'm waiting for all the carry-on maximalists to get their oversized roller AND stuffed "personal item" backpack from the overhead bins. ;)
I think you've understated/missed some of the aspects of flying itself, but probably not necessary to litigate it further. There's also all the stuff at the destination that the smartphone has enabled, eg - rental cars with carplay - walking directions on a paired smartwatch - transit pass via NFC (and transit-specific directions) - checking into accomodations (airbnb-type places especially) - authenticating Netflix, etc on tv at your airbnb/hotel - bike-sharing apps - activity passes in your digital wallet
I didn't see a lot of things coming to phones. I never expected that I'd pay for things by hovering my phone over a payment terminal. Didn't think it would replace my iPod (or MP3 CD player, or Discman, or Walkman). Absolutely had no idea it would replace my camera.
And on the other side of the coin... my "phone" is barely a phone. The phone features are probably what I like least about it.
Same with video calls, if anything that idea was oversold in 2007. Most people had Skype (or something similar) and would video call international calls (which were very expensive using the regular phone lines back then). If you were traveling internationally you would find an internet café log in to your Skype and make a call. Moving this capability to the smart phone was a no-brainier. Turns out that when we have it in our phones, video calls are still more popular on desktops (via zoom, etc.) in 2026.
- Publicly waving your resume around will passively invite job interviews.
There's a new OpenClaw adaptation, Ottie, that I think could be a bank manager, bank teller, stockbroker, piggy bank, accountant, wallet, security guard and credit card provider all rolled into one. I just haven't used it yet. https://ottie.xyz/
So that would be:
- Digital sidekick weeds out parasitic relationships.
There has to be tremendous value in that.
When solutions are looking for problems, it means that things may seem oversold when in fact they are still undersold.
Please don't. The reason we're still enjoying the bit of the old world as we know it, is just because nobody has really figured it out yet. Enjoy the moment, while it lasts.
Somewhere should definitely make this for missing persons.
> Doing this manually is already pretty trivial
No, it’s not! You are the one who made it trivial by using three words to define! How about if I could only fly out between 9 am-noon next Friday? Also, combine it with hotel and rental car. Many times total $ between sites could be a difference of close to $200 or more along with better itinerary. That’s just the surface. The more preferences you add, the complex it becomes, so make it a right scenario for agent automation along with calendar management which has similar complexity.
Probably more reliable and corp ones exist.
I think: to Uber founder, you’d have said get a driver or yellow cab :-)
To TurboTax founder, you’d have said get a tax accountant :-)
When you need a bunch of busy people in a meeting it becomes hard to book a meeting. If several people need to travel incuding get a visa it is hard to fit it all it between other meetings that refuired people caanot skip.
travel is hard when you are trying for the best deal across flights, hotels and such. many sites only guarentee prices for 15 minutes so you can't even get all the needed prices on a spreadsheet at once - particularly if you have flevible travel dates. I've booked a best price plane ticket only to discover it was the worst date for hotels and I could have saved money on a more expensive flight.
When it comes to agents' tasks, I tend to focus on things that I couldn't do before without automated agents, at least at the going price.
The kind of automation I'm doing is more like building a set of agents to generate marketing surveys for me. They take free form input from me and my project. They aren't particularly sexy but they go off and do something valuable that I literally would never pay for at the prices that they are normally.
Well, and doing them programmatically and automatically without any AI is also possible, if not trivial...and has been for some time.
And none of the friends playing with openclaw have any useful non-trivial workflows which can't be automated in oldschool way.
The only viable workflow so far I could think of - build your own knowledge base and info processing pipeline.
If they had vision they wouldn't be thrown out in a blog post.
If someone implemented something impressive with this stuff, they wouldnt be keeping it quiet. False negatives are unproductive
this plus a whole bunch of other skills (credit card payments notification and itemization/spend tracking, utilities (power/water) anomalies monitoring, daily solar power generation tracking and solar battery health checks, homelab maintenance (apt upgrades, storage cleanups, etc), media management, UPS battery health tracking, NAS disk heath tracking, etc).
I believe OpenClaw is start of a new genre of "always on" personal assistant/agent (tied to a "skills" store) that handles all the drudgery of daily living. you get back something genuinely precious which is the headspace to focus on the work only you can do. with OpenClaw, we are currently at the "Visicalc" stage and I'm excited where this will eventually lead.
No.
And there’s mundane answers why.
People used to talk about phone home screens, back in the day, every iPhone had 16 spots
It became wisdom everyone had the same 12 apps but then there were 4 that that were core for you and where most of your use went, but they were different apps from everyone else.
So it goes for agent demos.
Another reason: every agentic flow is a series of mundane steps that can be rounded to mundane and easy to do yourself. Value depends on how often you have to repeat them. If I have to book a flight once every year, I don’t need it and it’s mundane.
There’s no life changing demo out there that someone won’t reply dismissively to. If there was, you’d see them somewhere, no? It’s been years of LLMs now.
Put most bluntly: when faced with a contradiction, first, check your premises. The contradiction here being, everyone else doesn’t understand their agent demos are boring and if just one person finally put a little work and imagination into it, they’d be life changing.
Nobody shows this because the technology is still immature and very shit.
I was very impressed by Anthropic's swarm of agents building a C compiler earlier this year with 1000 PRs per hour. Easy to nitpick that it wasn't perfect, but it sure was impressive.
What percentage of people will think that’s life changing?
Because then we’re not talking about “can everyone up their demos to life changing, please?”, we’re talking about “can everyone use demos Oarch thinks are life changing, please?” - and “can build a MVP C compiler draft that barely works for $XXK” isn’t really that compelling to me, and we’re both software engineers, and my whole day job has been an agentic coder for…2.5 years?…now. My incentive structure and demographics are lined up perfectly to agree with you, but I don’t :/
Maybe a personalised diet and exercise plan based on a huge range of information: preferences, biometrics, habit forming, disposable income, your local area etc
I am not optimistic, not because the techs is lacking, but the context in which it is born is awful.
I don't think we should call presentations visionless or fault them for wanting to solve this UX nightmare.
Claude is pretty amazing, but it still goes down rabbit holes and makes obvious mistakes. Combining that with "oops I just bought a non-refundable flight to the wrong city" seems... unfun.
Just like anything in engineering really: you have to play around source control to understand source control, you have to play around with database indexes to learn how to optimize a database.
Once you've learned it and incorporated it into your tool set, you then have that to wield in solving problems "oh, damn, a database index is perfect for this."
To this end, folks doing flights and scheduling meetings using OpenClaw are really in that exploration / learning phase. They tackle the first (possibly uninventive thing) that comes to mind to just dive in and learn.
The real wins come down the line when you're tackling some business / personal life problem and go: "wait a second, an OpenClaw agent would be perfect for this!"
That's ridiculous. The utility of any tool is usually knowable before using it. That's how most tools work. I don't need to learn how to drive a car to know what I could use it for. I learn to drive it because I want to benefit from it, not the other way around.
It's the same with computers and any program. I use it to accomplish a specific task, not to discover the tasks it could be useful for.
OpenClaw is yet another tool in search of a problem, like most of the "AI" ecosystem. When the bubble bursts, nobody will remember these tools, and we'll be able to focus on technology that solves problems people actually have.
The utility of a program like Excel, Obsidian, Notion, Unity, Jupyter, or Emacs far beyond the knowledge of knowing how to use the product.
All of these products are hammers with nails as far as your creativity will take you.
Its wild to have be on a website called Hacker News, talking about a product that can make a computer do seemingly anything, and insisting its a tool in search of a problem.
Such as?