Curious. anyone here allow agents to make purchase decisions of >$100? | Hacker News Reader

Curious. anyone here allow agents to make purchase decisions of >$100?

3 pointsadityasriram12 comments

Is there anyone who has this level of trust on their AI agent? If so, how did you set it up in such a way that you can trust it to make the same decisions you would?

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No.

I don't even trust myself to make purchase decisions >$100. I'm probably going to make a bad purchase decision >$100 tonight.

Probably involving a board game.

lol, same xD

I don't yet know how to give it money to spend. I could give it a small crypto wallet, but few places accept that as currency. I was thinking of using one of those virtual credit card services that lets me set limits and block certain merchants. I will treat it like an intern. If it can show responsibility and reliability with small amounts then I will slowly increase its spending limit over time (and depending on the nature of the tasks it's performing).

yeah, like the robinhood credit card has an option where you can set it to make just one purchase and then become inactive. that's an option. what kinda purchases would you be thinking of making - professional like paying for ads online, or personal like buying a pair of shoes or something?

The virtual card approach is the right instinct but it breaks at scale. One card per agent with manual limits works for one agent doing one thing. It falls apart when you have 12 agents with different spend profiles running concurrently. The harder problem is concurrency. 10 agents can each pass a $100 limit check simultaneously before any one commits spend back. You budgeted $100 but spent $1000. Building SpendLatch to solve exactly this. Atomic budget reservation before execution so concurrent agents cannot collectively exceed a shared limit. Early access open: https://spend-safe-guard.lovable.app/

Just for stock market. It can't free type offers but has a few different limits (MINI = 1000, MED = 2500, MAX = 7000). Just for day trading with speculation. Up around 21% but also fully prepared to check it and be sitting at $0 due to my vibe coding.

No not at all. I only use AI assistants for help with price comparison of things when I'm in the grocery store and want to know what of the salsas is the best price without preservatives or other things like that.

ooh, does that help? or does it hallucinate a lot?

I made this for myself a while ago: https://rewardsgenie.calstudio.com/ it's a tool that tells me what's the most rewarding credit card to use for any purchase, but even with good context, it would sometimes make stuff up so I kinda stopped caring

It's pretty low risk and I'm just doing it for saving a few bucks. So far it has only had one moderate oppsie that I caught. It recommended a kefir brand that it turned out was actually low fat (which I didn't want), but in defense of the AI, I had also read the entire package and didn't see the tiny low fat words written on top of the pink cap either. I only noticed when I started drinking it and went back for a closer look.

I tried to checkout your tool, it starts with an account though and I don't have many CC. It sounds like it sound be useful though if you have those stacked deals like 3% cash back but 8% cash back on Tuesdays for gas only and then another card that's 5% cash back every day. I agree it's a good amount of context to keep track of though.

I kinda turned the tool off for now anyway cause I stopped paying the subscription for it haha

I imagine this to be better with an apple wallet type interface where I don't even have to ask and the wallet just auto selects whatever's best - but this seems to be super hard to build so I kinda just gave up

I feel like this is one of those things that people do for an experiment or headline but not in actual practice I'd be interested to see anyone who legitimately hands the keys over to their agents though

ikr? I keep hearing about people claim that they're handing over the keys to agents to make purchases for their businesses and it freaks me out to just think about it.

I was checking out polsia.com which says it autonomously builds a company for you - but it made a lot of random assumptions and built something completely different from what I wanted, and then asked me for my credit card details to start running marketing promos and I immediately stopped my fun little experiment

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