Comment by godwinson__4-8 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by godwinson__4-8 | Hacker News Reader

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A better internet is one in which LLMs enable everyone to ride their own custom Chromium (or whatever) flavor and the "frontend" of > 90% of sites - especially e-commerce - is generated specific to the user given their configuration of their personal LLM intermediary.

Companies will increasingly not ship frontends anymore, maybe just themed components that most users will ignore. "Pages" naturally become synthetic amalgamations of the various things you are interested in from various sources. Your preferred UI/UX comes for free courtesy of your LLM intermediary.

Everything is an API. Regulation will probably be needed to enforce this on the data access side given the incentives for companies to resist despite the benefit to the consumer. A relatively easy solution is to make it part of the requirements to take payments online, which is already highly regulated. The goal would be that essentially to operate anything approaching e-commerce online you must allow consumer AI intermediaries sufficient access that they could independently construct whatever your current frontend is from the publicly available API/MCP endpoints.

The tricky part of engineering around privacy/personas, account creation, etc. will be relatively easy following such state intervention. Take payments - virtual credit cards are already a useful way to protect data and mitigate risks when dealing with multiple vendors. This sort of API is a natural fit for a world in which companies are not allowed to box you into their horrible UIs, most of which are simply lazy attempts at copying the most profitable anti patterns of their competitors. Let your personal agent generate a unique card for each vendor behind the scenes. Why should you have to care?

How much better the internet would be if every UI/UX was in a meaningful sense, your own.

I feel like this is a bit too-optimistically describing an outcome which is unlikely, given how consumers have been slowly losing the same war for decades already.

The elephant in the room and the really "tricky part" involves powerful advertising and copyright-holding companies. They will (continue to) interpret that kind of user-agency as an existential threat. Their businesses revolve around deciding and knowing what you actually see and do with your computer, and their toolkit isn't just technical, but also economic and political.

That's why we already have problems with DRM, "felony contempt of business model" under the DMCA, browser fingerprinting, and everybody surrendering to arbitrary JS code controlling their computer. We capitulate not just to see an article or talk to a friend, but also to avoid our technical details getting into a secret un-appeal-able "suspicious" blacklist.

Not sure if companies would ever want this. They rely on their dark patterns and intentional manipulations to get customers to do what they want.

This is why I’ve thought that MCP and LLM access never made sense. You’re moving your users out of your brand and out of product.

Some companies are taking the opportunity to use the MCP server to send messages to the agent that the user won't necessarily see to protest. Agents are generally incredibly gullible and a huge opportunity for this type of thing.

That basically describes the Google shopping ribbon that appears with searches for products. When Google was good, you'd say a website doesn't exist if you can't find it in the 1st page of Google. The shopping ribbon provides offers from websites that aren't on the first page of my search result. Although I don't think you can pay without visiting the seller's website, this means that these are effectively stores that are more visible through the APIs they use to talk to Google's recommender engine. These suggestions are also no doubt personalized.

This also describes adsense, or Amazon or AliExpress, so it is clearly a successful model. If there is much left of other models. The only thing we have to hopeful about is that the interface is standardized so commodified SWE can be used to make your own Amazon or AliExpress.

I'm currently building something like this, basically converting every service to a standardized API that you can consume in a structured manner. Not focused on AI, but focused on normal users with special requirements on usability.

Basically the ad blocking approach has failed, and one needs to recognize that an allow-list based approach is needed when consuming internet-based offerings. Pick the cherries out of each website, leave the trash behind, and then build a custom per-website GUI around the things that you actually want to consume.

You shouldn't need LLM and AI to do such things. Even if such things might be useful to some people, I might want to use the API without LLM/AI and just to read the API documentation and then to make my own, and some other people might want to do similarly. In the specific case of e-commerce, I had been making my own specification of a file format for e-commerce (which is independent of the protocol), which is not intended to use with LLM/AI, but instead is intended to avoid many kind of dishonest business while also being flexible and that you could make and use your own software or some other implementaiton instead of being forced to use their UI/UX.

We could have a sort of “Representational State Transfer” using HTTP to represent the state of resources in both a human readable and machine readable format.

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