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Comment by pmontra | Hacker News Reader

I still have to understand what my AI agents could do that I don't want to do myself. Buy stuff? No thanks, I want to see what I buy. I think that they are 99% a solution in search of a problem.

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My family (unfortunately) uses InstaCart and probably 15% of items are a shitty "replacement" "not what I wanted". For time sensitive items, having the shitty replacement item NOW is better than having to wait for the "item I actually wanted", so we often just accept the inferior product. This is a dark pattern that I could see AI adopting -- it buys tons of cheap crap you didn't want, some of it was right, and you're left with a mess of returns to sort out, esp. if those returns require you to physically take some sort of action like physically returning the item to the store

Same. Well the biggest thing I don't want to do that they could help with is work. But in the cases where it can do that for me, there's no world where that benefit goes to me rather than my employer.

Well, that's the very nature of the employer / employee relationship. In my case I write software for my customers and I trade time for money. If I use an AI to write code two times faster my daily rate doesn't double. However I can keep my costumers.

That's only another step in the path I experienced since the 80s, when I had to type every single character because there was no auto complete, no command line history, very few libraries. I was very good at writing trees, hash tables, linked lists and so was everybody else. Nobody would hire me if I were that slow at writing code today.

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