People coming up with these tech use cases live in a reality where price sensitivity isn't a thing.
"You can call an Uber with a voice command"
"You can ask alexa to buy you things"
"Your AI will order food for you"
Seem like magical ideas that will remove friction and increase sales. Except that regular people compare 13 different options to pick the cheapest one. No one wants to see food appear on their doorstep followed by a bill they cannot pay.
> People coming up with these tech use cases live in a reality where price sensitivity isn't a thing.
Amen, there's a worldview difference going on here, and it goes beyond comparative pricing of 2+ choices, and includes other error/reliability issues.
For example, they aren't too concerned with the reservation-cancellation fee when it schedules the wrong fancy dinner date, the restocking-fee for returning the wrong product, the difficulty of getting refunds for the wrong flight, etc.
If it messes up sometimes, well, that's just the price of convenience... but they're able/willing to put a much higher price on convenience than the median consumer.
Money is a claim on future resources, today that generally means energy / oil.
I don't see money as convenient, honestly money adds a lot of complexity and inconvenience onto my life. What it adds in a good way, though, is power - power to trade hours of my time for stuff I want to buy or services I want to psy for.
“The fact is that the greatest crimes are caused by excess and not by necessity. Men do not become tyrants in order that they may not suffer cold; and hence great is the honour bestowed, not on him who kills a thief, but on him who kills a tyrant.” - Aristotle
That omits the majority of the casual, daily acts of violence and greed, committed by people to secure their basic needs at the expense of their families and neighbors.
Those falls under non-great crimes, the implicit counterpart to the explicitly mentioned great crimes. It would follow that rectifying those those merely gets one petty honour, rather than great honour.
I think you've identified the core reason people won't use these tools to make blind purchases, at least those who aren't {m,b}illionaires.
A noteworthy proof of this is the failure of Amazon Dash buttons [1] that blindly ordered your consumables for you. Amazon gave away these devices essentially for free ($5 off with your first order, or some such offer), and people still didn't seem to have been comfortable to use it.
The buttons had a "dedupe" setting to allow only a single pending item until said item was delivered fwiw.
I really liked the dash buttons for two reasons:
1. It made ordering something you regularly and only buy online anyway easy for an entire household, like for my use case, hookah coals roughly every month.
2. You could place the button next to where you store said consumable and most folks would prefer using it over asking for a link or reminding someone else to re-order.
I do think it was a mistake to launch with an initial limited set of branded buttons for common household goods most people pickup at the store anyway (like detergent) instead of a generic button for my point 1's usecase but thats just plain-old BigTech thinking.
Re 2: I always got a chuckle seeing that "slim jims" were one of the buttons and could envision someone getting into their pantry only to notice they are down to their last 2 slim jims, but thankfully they have a dash button right there to avoid this future disaster.
I never got one, but they certainly made sense in my mind for something like laundry detergent, etc. You notice you are getting low, hit the button, forget about it and 3 days later it shows up and you go "oh, right perfect".
Given later advances in smartphones, I think I'd rather have a little QR code or NFC sticker that encodes "saved product 123".
Then a platform-agnostic open-source app on your phone pulls up the matching entry (e.g. "toilet paper" or whatever) and gives you a fast way to go to the previously-ordered products' page.
Then you aren't bound to any particular vendor, you see prices before ordering, and you could use the same system for other kinds of locationally-bound notes or tasks.
Yeah, the price of bulk consumables like paper towels or toilet paper or supplements or detergent regularly changes on Amazon, as does availability of a specific SKU. If you just re-buy the same SKU every time you can end up paying considerably more and/or having your supplier change from Amazon to some random third-party of questionable integrity.
I can imagine an AI agent grappling with all that but the first time a Dash button price gouged me that way I'd throw the thing straight into the trash.
I was always surprised and disappointed that Amazon didn’t have some customer-friendly pricing policy with these. For example, that your next Dash order for its associated product would cost $X (and maybe an indication alongside the delivered product of what the next one would cost). That or a small LCD to show the current price. Instead, it just struck me as a “please charge me any number you like” button, and I don’t have anything like enough trust in Amazon (or price insensitivity) to push one of those.
Online stores like Amazon already solved that by having a minimum buy for free shipping. People now have more junk in their house because of minimum order for free shipping.
I agree and I think price might be one example of a more general thing which is just that you want to make the decision - based on price and a whole load of other factors that you can't be bothered to explain or may not even be able to articulate to a third party.
I think it's pretty common to actually not want to delegate and just do simple things yourself. It can be satisfying, aside from any of the practical problems it avoids.
Maybe it's a personality thing, maybe it's a learned behaviour thing, but I'm not sure I've met many people I'd imagine being happy just speaking these sorts of things into a phone and seeing what shows up.
Even complex things like travel booking. I have been fortunate enough a few times in my life to have humans whose job it was to help me with things like booking travel, and eventually they did learn my preferences, but there's a ton of nuance that is just hard to explain and doesn't show up in data. There is always a lot of back-and-forth, trial and error, to get aligned on how I want things arranged. Stuff like what time of day I want my flight to be depending on what I had going on the day before. What seat I want on a particular aircraft, vs. a different seat on a different aircraft. What hotel I might prefer, because a restaurant I like happens to be across the street. I've been around long enough to never say never when it comes to technology, but I will say AI agents are not even remotely close to a point where I'd want one to be booking a trip for me. If I don't even want a skilled and experienced human doing it for me most of the time, the bar is very high for software.
> What seat I want on a particular aircraft, vs. a different seat on a different aircraft.
This seems really strange to me? I have preferences on seats too, but they largely boil down to “I want to be at the front to deplane faster” and “I want a bulkhead or emergency seat for leg room” and “I prefer aisle seat”. I can communicate those preferences and a human booking my flight can balance them regardless of specific airframe.
As someone who flies between Australia and the US 3-4 times a year, not at all.
I want leg room and the ability to sleep with my head against the wall of the aircraft, but I want to be away from galleys and toilets and not in a seat where the overhead locker closest to me is reserved for crew equipment.
Ok the seat at the front is 40% more, do you still want it? Or you've got a layover of 3 hours anyway, do you still need it? Or it's only available on an airline you had a bad experience with, or you're checking luggage so have to wait for that anyway...
If companies pushing these agents find they're reliably making customers overpay by about ~30%, I wonder why they don't run some sort of subsidy (from their pocket) where like orders placed by your AI are 30% off.
Certainly feels less gameable than the kind of stuff we already see so much of (like referral bonuses, free sign-up balance, "unlimited" promos, etc)
My wife is a dentist. She brings her lunch because its cost effective. Her assistants all order door dash, _regularly_.
> Except that regular people compare 13 different options to pick the cheapest one.
Which takes time... and the AI can do that for you, presumably? Do I trust AI _right now_ to do that _for me_? No. Will people try it out and invariably work out the kinks, for a stable set of use cases? Definitely. Screens are just one UI for ordering stuff. There's definitely a market for doing the same thing with minimal or no screen time.
I just can’t see this ever being common. It sounds terrible. Imagine phoning a number, a person answers and you attempt to relay and negotiate a food delivery order through them, in what world is that better than browsing an app? We don’t have to imagine, this is what we used to do. It sucked and almost everyone stopped doing it in favour of browsing an app. It’s just a superior interface for that sort of thing, it’s already as good as it needs to be.
Different use cases, if the apps don't offer what you need because it's uncommon or custom, then the call is superior, apps can't offer every option, so you default back to messaging and a back and forth, at which point you do want realtime communication
So you need to know exactly what you want to order? People rarely order food like that in my opinion. The majority of the time people like to browse menus and consider the options. In that scenario the voice chat interface is absolutely terrible. “Remind me again of the option you presented to me 3 minutes ago? No not that one, list them again. No I don’t need to know the full item description with all ingredients, just be brief!” and so on. It’s just not an efficient way to relay that type of data.
> My wife is a dentist. She brings her lunch because its cost effective. Her assistants all order door dash, _regularly_.
Ah, this is the new marshmallow test, except instead of "can you leave a marshmallow uneaten on the table" it's "can you avoid summoning a taxi to take a single marshmallow to your house".
(Bluesky calls this "burrito taxi discourse"; I do notice that a lot of the people who claim that delivery is absolutely essential to them give an impression of privileged learned helplessness while at the same time claiming to be poor. Perhaps that's unfair, or perhaps not. I'm just a higher earning middle aged professional like the rest of HN, who rarely orders delivery food)
This is common because there's probably some other, major time savings things that your wife is able to spend money on that lets her have a reliable stock of food that she can plan and prepare for her lunch.
AI or not, ordering any food delivered takes time to deal with and collect. When your food is already there, you can pick the exact second you want to eat lunch and not wait 30 or 45 minutes for someone else's delivery time frame to match yours.
Beyond time, I will go out of my way to make larger portions for leftovers because I know what's in the food I make, and I try to make healthy food. Even "healthy" options from places that deliver aren't always that healthy. There's an element of knowledge about what I eat that is equal to cost savings in my mind.
> AI or not, ordering any food delivered takes time to deal with and collect.
It is few taps in an app and going out for it when it arrives. Literally. And while you are at work anyway. Cooking, shopping and packing take more time - and at the time when you could have been doing something more pleasurable (like chilling with netflix).
Only when framed that way. Different strokes for different folks. Some people actually enjoy cooking. Being in the room and providing for people. Thinking about the recipe and how it came out this time vs last time, and what to change next time to make it just so. Being taken to a Michelin star restaurant is an experience that I will never forget.
>When your food is already there, you can pick the exact second you want to eat lunch
Yes but you have to spend time making it beforehand dummy. (Not saying it's not fiscally irresponsible to get delivery for lunch every day, but you're obviously missing the point of the convenience)
Habit + planning + preparing food in bulk can save a lot of time and money. If you're already in the kitchen preparing a Sunday evening meal, you can scale that up a bit and have a few extra lunches ready without much additional effort.
>Will people try it out and invariably work out the kinks, for a stable set of use cases? Definitely.
Trust and incentives aren't thinks you can prepare a test suit with 100% code coverage for. The perverse incentives to serve me what the highest sponsored bidder paid for is too strong, and there's to little guardrails right now to protect against that eventuality. Therefore, I do not trust the process no matter how battletested. Enshittification will eventually veer it off course anyway.
You want my trust, you need to add guardrails (with teeth on them) or change the incentive to not screw me over.
What’s your logic behind agents being worse at this than humans?
My agent routinely does comparison shopping across various sites to filter out according to my criteria, and even finds coupons - something I never bothered to do.
I would say that especially when you are price sensitive, agentic shopping should be your thing.
This stems from the differences in median income of people coming up with these tools and the target audience/median consumer, i.e. these people are out of touch
I remember meetings with our M$ management when I was at Wunderlist (after the acquisition) singing the praises of Cortana and "smart inboxes".
The disconnect was almost comical. All the engineers and other regular employees had "eeew, get it away from me" on their faces, and the sentiment was "how much do I have to pay to not get this?"
The managers, on the other hand...I don't know how to describe it. What they exuded was something along the lines of a religious or probably more accurately cultish experience. They had been on the mountain, they had seen the light, the future had spoken to them, and they were preaching the gospel.
And it didn't seem like they were faking it, either.
Couldn’t the agent do the comparison for you? And couldn’t you give it more complex constraints? E.g. instead of saying “order an uber to the airport”, you’d say “order a rideshare to the airport if it’s under $40 and less than a 10 minute wait”
Summoning Ubers arguably is a great use case because at airports you're probably busy moving to the pickup point and dealing with spotty signal on the way there. Comparing multiple services by hand in that environment is kind of a pain in the ass. It would be great to instead use an agent that is probably talking to their APIs to do this faster, and I can focus on other things at that moment like texting whoever I'm seeing.
So astoundingly marginal. Seriously wondering how many Meta astroturfers are in here with some of these posts
What would be great would be a unified car ride app which accessed all vendors. The AI layer adds nothing, I would say detracts actually, and it would not be more popular. UI is just superior to chat in many, many applications.
I think you're just in your own bubble of how people use technology. I hate typing and looking at a screen while in motion. I can absolutely imagine myself using voice mode at home saying "I need a ride to X destination, leaving home within 30 minutes, just me in the car, check Uber Lyft and Waymo and book the cheapest one."
I don't have any kind of agent set up to do that now, but to me that sounds like removed friction even if I use it just a few times a year.
I constantly use the Ask AI thing in Google maps to tell it a complex route involving biking and transit and needing to be at a certain place at a certain time. It hasn't messed up on me yet. I would much rather specify the question in natural language than type anything into a rule based UI. In fact I built a toy app years ago that handled a few of my most common queries with the Maps API and I still never used it because of the friction.
It takes 30 seconds to check both uber and lyft. 45 seconds adding waymo to the mix. You want to pay for a service to save you 45 seconds. And thats the best case. Worst case it screws up an address and that isn’t unlikely either.
It does not in fact take 30 seconds to check uber alone even when you have good signal - and correctly copy the address every time without deleting it by accident, not having to restart the app because it times out and won't let you back to the search bar, etc.
The whole point of agents for this kind of stuff is to not have to think about it so you can focus on something more important than a mobile app failing to compute its core function alongside the other nonsense it's doing. And no it doesn't screw up the address either, this isn't 2021 anymore.
So in this low cell signal situation the gigantic bloated ai solution will book a rideshare for you? When the first party apps can’t even connect to their servers?
most airports in the US have good cell service. you book the uber as the plane parks. you meet your uber driver at the rideshare pickup area. i fly a lot; this is what most people do
Which is the stupidest fucking thing ever. There should just be a line of cars waiting to pick you up and you get in line and that car drives you to your destination. Aka a taxi stand, just with technology. Get in the car, the driver scans a QR code on your phone that was generated by you, telling the driver where to go. The reason we can't just do that is because taxi laws are stupid and Ubers are not a taxi so we're forced to play that stupid game because money and power and politics so things remain stupid until the person in power blocking progress ages out aka dies of old age.
What’s missing from this is also the choice of the rideshare driver. Maybe they don’t want to take you 30 miles to your destination. Maybe your destination is in an area of no business so it’ll cost more for them to get back to a place they’ll find another fare.
The rideshare race to the bottom model of pricing has some bad aspects to it, but choice for the driver before accepting the trip is one positive.
> There should just be a line of cars waiting to pick you up and you get in line and that car ...
This one is not law. That absolutely exists ... but airports demand money for taxis to join that line of customers and so these got more expensive and are never the cheap option.
maybe but this is an AI chatbot inside Uber that will not consider other services. And your own claw will not get an API to be able to compare. Can you imagine the horror on the providers faces if you suggest such idea.
If you’re that price conscious, take the bus. Or just get in the line for an actual taxi. The last time I tried to get ride share at the airport the drivers all declined them to drive up the price. I started getting offers for 200, I just went and got a taxi for 50.
UX/HCI researchers have been harping on "recollection vs recall" for like 50 years now, and we're throwing it all away. When your web form is replaced with an AI agent, not only does your user need to remember what the form looked like, now they have to type/say it all over again! Holy friction Batman!
> Thinking... The user told me to stick to a $40 maximum. I need to determine if that's a hard limit or a suggestion. Perhaps the user is doing price comparison for an exercise. I'll order 3 different ubers and let the user decide which to board when they arrive. They said a $40 limit, but that's just for the ride - I shouldn't factor in the cancellation fees.
Where do the constraints come from? When I do something like order an Uber to the airport, I don't typically game out in advance the full decision tree of what things I might see on the app to make me change my mind.
It's a classic example of a task that AI cannot do better than humans (because it's quite simple to do manually and the AI doesn't know what that human craves in that moment), and personal stakes (if it fucks up, you'll have to eat something you don't like or go hungry for a while - people tend to feel viscerally about their food).
My mother isn't even poor (decent pension) but she asks a neighbour to drive her to the hospital instead of a 50 euro Uber. A taxi is basically the last resort.
I like the ones that feature new AI browsers or operating systems. They will try to tell you how cool is it that you can just highlight something on the screen and/or type in a prompt, and have some 2D or 3D interactive visualizations pop up. Literally the most useless, inelegant things imaginable.
I think this has been a trope of how detached SV has been from the real world for a while.
Google has shown this demos for ages where their AI books you a flight with no friction, as if people wouldn’t have a gazillion tabs open with skyscanner, kayak, trip.com, google flights…
We buy our household stuff through our household agent. Very simple. It does the research, matches inventory, and browses to Amazon and buys things. Other sites it volunteers information. Overall, I’m a fan.
It’s not for everyone clearly but it’s pretty good. Wife also downloaded Muse the other day (really, how dare she betray me like this) to do a Facebook marketplace thing. Worked great. Other guy didn’t speak a lick of English and she didn’t speak the least Spanish. Another sale that went perfectly.
Nothing smart. I photograph the closet occasionally like “do you see the X?” when I put something away, or a Costco purchase receipt. And it obviously has Amazon. It has cameras through the house but never uses them for this.
It’s kinda vibes based. “You’re at Costco. You last bought X”.
What freaks me out is the canonical "AI planned my entire vacation itinerary" example. I don't think I ever pay as much attention to anything in life as I do when I'm picking flights and hotels. Travel plans will be the very last thing I farm out to AI.
I'm fine delegating my programming work to a clanker, even accounting, but come on. The clanker isn't going to have to deal with the consequences of booking $40,000 airplane trips to hotels full of bedbugs.
I use it extensively once im at a destination to generate ideas for where to go and what to see based on my interests and likes and dislikes, e.g "I'm in X city for the next 3 days, and I enjoy hiking and wwii history, what are some things to do?" "my mother in law and wife want to take a daytrip in region X, whats a good day plan given my MIL cant walk or hike far and my wife wants to take photos of scenic views?" I've gotten some great off-the-beaten-path suggestions this way.
I use AI extensively in my trips. It’s not that I literally prompt ChatGPT and then walk away while it books everything. It’s just a search engine on steroids that I use to generate ideas and collate options until I choose the things I want.
Does "I'm going to visit X city, show me a list of interesting place prepare me a schedule to visit them for X days" fit ? Because that's what i'm doing.
I think in the context of kbelder's original comment, it refers more to people having AI do the actual booking / handling payments, though I'd say you're getting there if you're having it pick out places for you. At that point you're just risking your time, not your wallet, which is easier to believe.
planned & booked are not the same, I fear my sister very much has planned any vacation she did in recent times with AI. Just not booked it that way. And also planned doesn't mean no human in the loop, either.
People don't, in general, plan my trips for me but I do long distance walking trips in areas where it's useful to have some specialist on-the-ground knowlege so I use companies that specialize in that sort of thing. Book my own air and urban hotels though.
People use AI whether they believe it or not. Think you found a hidden deal, and hidden cheap flight, leading you to a hidden matcha cafe with a hidden view? Think again! The booking company which is owned by a booking company which is owned by a booking company wanted you to find it.
Something that is perhaps “underreported” is that a lot of AI solutions aren’t easier to do than just doing the thing.
My budget app, for example: It’s not easier for me to ask the AI bot “show me all my transactions from McDonald’s” than it is to click on the search bar/payee filter and type “McDonald’s.”
The UX experience for basically all LLMs that I've interacted with is having the AI sneak in where I don't want it and end up taking 10 extra seconds to do what used to be a 0.1ms operation.
The worst place for AI is in search bars, yet that seems to be the first place every product manager wants to put it. I hate waiting forever to get results because AI is poorly searching in the foreground.
I feel like I have to keep reminding people at work that LLMs are more expensive and have higher latency and less predictable behavior than plain old deterministic software.
Those tradeoffs must be considered when deciding whether a feature requires regular software or AI.
I had a fun day at the office pointing out that using an AI to edit the lighting in photos of an event also had it do creative things like make the speaker smile bigger and remove her wedding band and also make the eyes of the C-suite listening more open.
A few repeats of the same initial light adjustment and she had a big joker grin and the CEO had giant anime eyes and looked 25 years younger.
Now, if we were to do this first "fix the light" pass on every publicity photo, what would it be adding and taking away without our knowledge? I fundamentally don't like using a tool that will do other things than what I want it to do, without even warning me. The consequences of a noticeable fuckup will be on me, not on the machine, so I'd rather adjust the slider myself thank you.
Gemini in Google Docs/Workspace is so frustrating like this. I can get Claude to manipulate a Google Doc using the API, no problem, but talk to Gemini, the AI agent in the same browser window and it says it can't do anything [0]
[0] as of a couple of months ago when I last tried reformatting a slide deck using Gemini (failed) and then Claude (succeeded)
In contrast, Confluence's AI bot is a living nightmare to me.
Rovo makes changes I don't want that I have to undo and its "search" is bafflingly low quality compared to the old search experience, but most of all it just makes every page take longer to load and puts annoying UI elements in the way of what I actually want to interact with.
It mirrors every single other in-app AI bot experience I've had to date - less useful than the functionality they replaced with it, slow and annoying.
I’m a heavy AI user at work and I agree, Atlassian’s bot is painful. It’s also “gullible.” It will fail to do something and then just assume it cannot, that it cannot create pages or make issues or whatever.
The only one I’ve enjoyed is Grafana’s. It’s been a joy to use tbh.
We got something called "glean". It is better than Confluence search, because confluence search is utter crap. It's just a keyword scan with no concept of relevance.
I had a conversation the other day with some who told me that one very useful thing with AI now is that you can use it to find hotels in a city. My obvious reaction was that this has been a one or two button press thing on google maps for a very long time. They replied well yeah but now with AI you can tell it to only find rooms that don't go over a certain price.
I think a good chunk of people just do not ever try to understand what buttons do, ever, and it's maddening.
Going to the grocery store is a similar example. For a while I was big on getting my groceries delivered. But then I started to realize that the amount of time it took to fill my cart was basically the same amount of time it took in the actual store, so I wasn’t really saving much time or convenience at all… plus I was missing out on some intrinsic joy of discovering and picking things myself.
Up thread I just made a comment about how for some things I see talking verbally to an AI agent as the lowest friction solution, but I think I'll always be a physical grocery store browsing guy. I got groceries delivered a few times, years ago when my wife and I had covid at the same time. The experience was worse in every way for me than going down the aisles and putting things in my cart.
Agreed, I also enjoy going through the line and making small talk with the cashier. Mostly because of remote work post-COVID. We have delivery this year with a newborn in the house, but now that they are almost 1 I don't think I am going to renew.
> click on the search bar/payee filter and type “McDonald’s.”
Sure but you still have to open a dedicated app and that the search is just a string search.
I recently setup Muse (just seems to have the easiest out of the box connectors) to connect to all my accounts over Plaid. I can ask questions like:
* Review all recurring transactions.
* Show overview of last 12 months of spending by category.
* Review last months CC transactions.
* Estimate next months expenses.
And then in the same app, I automatically get personal financial and budget information that's actual useful. I can adjust the frequency and type of content just by updating the agent's goal.
I tried using YNAB. It felt so cumbersome compared to just asking AI for the info. I had to make a $300 fake expense to zero out an account minimium balance, I can't treat an investment account as a spending account (without some weird hacks).
Meanwhile, the same AI can cleanup my email inbox, watch my calendar, etc.
And I spent like ~2 days having Claude (over remote-control) create a Monte-Carlo simulation for retirement (including Tax calculations). Works great, I can read the code and make whatever changes I need.
The most friction I still encounter is the connector itself being too opinionated. Plaid's API tries to predict future expenses based on what's detected as a recurring charge; this of course was incorrect if similar Amazon.com charge amounts occur on similar days.
IMO purpose built apps are dead. A sandbox of tools that AI can use is far more flexible. Spending $20/month only needs to replace 3-4 other paid single purpose apps (or identify a single $20 recurring service to cancel) to be net-positive. Plus you don't have to configure it, just ask questions.
But that's you, a developer, who not only understands what they actually _need_ in order to have a good budgeting app and retirement planning app, for lack of a better word, but also are willing to spend the time setting it up, understand how it functions, and get it functional.
> And I spent like ~2 days having Claude (over remote-control) create a Monte-Carlo simulation for retirement (including Tax calculations). Works great, I can read the code and make whatever changes I need.
This is the biggest indicator of the divide between the AI-enthusiastic developer and the average person.
The average person isn’t going to want to sit down and spend two days to fine-tune code or a spreadsheet to accomplish this. They want an easy-to-navigate interface that is dead-simple and ready to go with the ability to get an answer done in five minutes or less. If they hit any snags in the first 30 seconds they’ll ditch it and move to the next solution. Why should they have to spend their time creating a duplicate solution when there are so many ready-to-go alternatives already out there? They want the path of least resistance.
True, but by "two days" I mean I asked Claude to do it from my phone while watching TV in the evening after work.
I think for people who can quickly understand and describe systems/code, AI is very magical. So many personal projects would be otherwise too tiring except for the 0.1% OSS developer personality that can spend 4+ hours a day working on stuff. Now AI means many projects can be implemented at the speed of thought.
Even still, the average person is going to have no idea how to prompt for such a thing. Do you think normal people know what monte-carlo simulations are?
I still use Monarch Money (similar to YNAB) but any time I have a real question I just download my data and ask Claude Code questions about my transactions. It works very well and it's not much effort.
Until they are a no-call no-show at 5am to go to the airport. Then you’re a Rideshare Co customer for life because there’s tracking and they will keep you in the loop.
I have never had my car service miss a pickup in 20 years. (Though I've slept through an alarm clock a couple of times.) But, then I don't really have reliable Uber or taxi service where I live.
I sat through an egregious demo of an AI add on for documentation. The flow was load doc (e.g. pdf) -> data filled into a specialized form view. To really wow me, they showed how I could type in the AI chat interface "change the title to 'abc'" and then it would make the change in the form view.
Why can I not just type the new name into the title field itself? Well, this is supposedly easier and in time the AI will learn and get the title right 100% of the time, so there won't be a need for me to edit it.
This is a major player in the industry, not some random kid.
This is where I see a lot of AI stuff right now honestly.
It's just "I want the computer to figure this out for me even if it takes longer than the old tools, because I cannot be bothered to learn how to use the old tools"
And then there’s the mindset of “the existing toolsets don’t fit my mindset very well, so I’ll have AI recreate them in a way that only makes sense to me and then harass everyone to adopt the new tool because I understand it.”
Someone didn’t like how our Jira tickets and Confluence docs were structured so they vibe-coded a new ticketing system that has a custom web UI with a Microsoft Access database on the back-end. Management and Customers don’t like it for a good range of reasons but he requires everyone who works on his projects to use it.
Another person didn’t like our build script for generating a templated Ansible role so they made some kind of MCP adapter or harness to ask you canned questions on what your role is named and what features to include, then scrapes our docs to get the required directory structure and generates it. It does literally the same thing but sometimes does it wrong and consumes tokens regardless.
It’s like the XKCD comic about competing standards, but accelerated for any person who is minorly inconvenienced and has API tokens to an AI service.
I think though if you re-phrase this to “I am lazy…” (the CORE common trait of every great SWE I have priviledge of working with in the last 30 years) “… and I do not want to manually do any work I can automate” things look a lot different through that lens
Yahoo Mail tried to add an "AI summary" to the top of all emails. The two line summary was worse than merely reading the two lines in the original email.
There's a symmetry to things that happened in the mid-aughts as at that time there were some shifts in computing habits as well. For instance I knew a bunch of folks at the time who, instead of typing "www.website.com" into the URL bar, would open up google and type "www.website.com" and then click the top link.
I'd ask why and they'd just shrug, like *obviously* google is the front page for everything on the web.
Your anecdote is spot on and it feels like the people who are doing things that way are channeling similar energy.
its a classical effect of having a hammer and recognising everything as a nail to whack. its pretty tricky to find a problem well suited to a tool like LLMs.
i programming stuff using LLM of which the resultant programs are deterministic and dont use LLMs or tokens is a better or easier approach to having gains. because the resulting program can be easier to use and doesnt cost a lot to run. Automations are a good target, or integratig libraries into other programs. tedious things u know well how to do but take time to do manually. then once done fix a problem or workflow that u need fixed by the solution yielded.
ive not seen 1 app that does calls to an LLM that i find useful, apart from harnesses that produce code (which is only recently becoming more appealing and might depend on how good and fast u can write code, at which im not the best nor the fastest.)
My wife has to submit a bunch of translated documents for procurement processes. Noone really reads those but they are a hard requirement. These are usually in DOCX or sometimes PDF with tables, product images etc. So I built her a little applet which (after clicking two buttons) sends the XML or PDF to an LLM in chunks and it spits back the same structure but with translated text. Of course there are edge cases where it doesn’t work perfectly but I’d say it works 95% of the time in a good enough quality to submit them. Saves her roughly 0.5-1 hour per job and much cheaper than other alternatives.
I’m doing something similar at work. Thousands of contracts, need to extract billing terms/logic. It’s scattered throughout each contract but has no summary, each contract can be hundreds of pages of non applicable legalese. The problem is, once I run it, can I trust the output without manual verification? How will I know if it skipped/missed something from a contract?
Recently laid off and not a big AI guy… but to illustrate your points:
Tailoring + proofing resumes to _manually_ apply to jobs is a great application of LLMs in my experience. But I wouldn’t want an AI to apply for jobs for me.
Funny thing about that. This time last year I was applying for jobs and kept my same old latex generated flawed human resume that I’ve been using 20 years or so.
Recruiters said it was standing out in the tech sector. Apparently AI likes to embellish way too much so you don’t trust it.
Or they just flat out don't work. I was on an insurance website recently, and getting big annoying popups to use their AI agent for help with the site or my plan, even encouraging me to ask questions about my plan. I did have one, very simple, "what's my plan's copay?"
"Sorry, I do not have that information."
So then, "Ok, where do I find it?"
"Sorry, I do not have that information."
What the hell? What is this for? Of course, someone will point out "it's because of regulations" or some technical limitation, sure, I can understand that, but then I must ask the question then why did you think it was worth building?
I called my dentist because I was sick and wanted to move my appointment. You can't talk to a human anymore, it's all ai, after a bit of back and forth it assured me it had canceled my appointment and booked a new one 2 days later. I was actually surprised it went so well
The next day I get an email at 7pm telling my appointment was successfully rescheduled for 1pm (the same day), none of these match either my og appointment nor the rescheduled one
When I went to the dentist for the appointment the ai assistant supposedly rebooked, they told me there was a mistake and I was assigned a kids dentist.
In the end I had to rebook a third appointment with the receptionist
Dentists are plentiful and none of them really know what they are doing (see recent experiment posted here on HN that has The data to support this asserrion).
I was dealing with a LLM help bot on a website where I had to upload some documents and asked the bot how to get through a step where I simply don't have the right things and it kept telling me I could sidestep that (but I could not) or upload the thing (which I told it I could not to begin with!).
It's not like the previous tree based bots were good but at least they had a path to speaking with a person.
I've had the bot of a "modern" holiday home tell me some rubbish about luggage storage. Fortunately, I knew that there would be a human fallback during working hours so it worked out OK. But who thought that it was a good idea to have a shitty bot to ask about important things?
It's being sold everywhere to people fed up with dealing with other people who waste their time. Because that really IS a problem.
Most (Note: Not all!) questions you get when you work in a "customer service" role come from lazy, unobservant, or dumb people. So pre-AI, a large business needs an army of people to answer the phone and do things like walking confused people through, step-by-step, how to reset their password. "Did you check your email? Did you check the Spam folder? Did you give it 5-10 minutes?"
So AI is sold with the promise that you can just put it in front of your human agents, and then you'll only need 1/5 the staff (let's set aside the unfortunate economic implications for the other 80%) because most people's questions are stupid and trivial to solve.
Problem is, the dummies can't identify and divert themselves to the bot up front, so the person who loses most (other than the CS agents who lost their jobs) is people like you or me, who only contact customer service when we are reasonably sure there is no way to solve our own problem on the website/the app/by ourselves. We have to argue with a bot which is prompted "You're about to hear from a dummy whose main problem is most likely that he hasn't read any of our ZenDesk support articles, can't operate our website or a computer properly... and he probably has an IQ of 75. Send him answers from the FAQ -- repeatedly if needed -- and try to get him to go away. Don't give up, and don't escalate to an agent unless very specific criteria are met."
FWIW, my question would have been in any decent FAQ but there wasn't one. It was simply: I have to return my keycard when leaving the room in the morning, but I need to store some luggage until the early evening. How do I get into the building and into the storage room? IIRC, the main door was just open at daytime, but the luggage room needed a keycard (really smart system, you clowns). The bot advised to just keep the keycard and use it for pickup. Of course it didn't work anymore after checkout time. Fortunately, there was a guard / service person when I came to pick up my stuff and I more or less knew that in advance based on previous days.
> the person who loses most (other than the CS agents who lost their jobs) is people like you or me, who only contact customer service when we are reasonably sure there is no way to solve our own problem on the website/the app/by ourselves.
Once is a fairly long while, I do have a duh moment. But usually I hesitate and hesitate because i'm sure I'll get some low-level CS person working from a script. The upside such as it is is that I'm (rarely) pleasantly surprised.
I had a bot tell me to click something in the chat when it had sent me an email... The whole experience was so bad that the company behind it lost my business.
They’re building very little. They’ve been sold/told AI is good at customer service. They usually only bother pointing it to their knowledge base and FAQs and can only really answer questions if the answer is in that
I think to some extent it's possible to reduce cognitive load even on these simpler actions just because you have to see less unrelated data on what you asked about. I say this as someone who doesn't really use LLM integrations.
And these type of requests consume very little tokens in comparison to almost any programming work.
But asking yourself "can I trust this information?" is the baseline amount of cognitive load added to the interaction.
Depending on the level of trust or importance of the decision this may already be a fairly high bar to clear before being able to claim any overall reductions in the interactions itself.
An AI bot can jump straight to the thing you want, like "How much did I spend at McDonalds over the last year?"
It's worth considering whether you really want the full list of MCD transactions or is that just a step you're used to as a means to getting the answer you want.
I'm not sure about what you use but my primary credit card (a major American bank) has an incredibly annoying interface for searching previous transactions.
That's how I feel about LLMs for programming, too. I've tried using them to write programs for me, but every time, when I finish up it winds up being a wash in terms of time+effort, or it took more time+effort than just writing it myself.
Okay, now do "all my transactions this year for retail stores"? Or "All luxury / deductible purchases"?
Of course when you arbitrarily limit the problem domain to some specific example, you can make any tool seem pointless and stupid. It's when you expand your goals to things that aren't trivial that you get benefits.
Do we need not Mathematica or NumPy because calculators can add just fine?
Do I need to? If I moderately underestimate my entertainment spending because my Apple+ subscription got categorized as a grocery purchase, that doesn't seem like a big problem.
If you're the type who double-checks your work and this is important: 40% of the time.
If you're the type who doesn't: probably 90% of the time.
This feels like goal-post moving now, with questions less genuinely curious about an answer and more trying to "get" me. How am I supposed to answer that, it depends on the task and the model and the harness and specific human being using it.
Use it or don't, I don't care, but at least be genuine in the discussion.
I don't use doordash or buy food like that but I'm definitely using them to find me and buy me clothes that fit me and I want in Vinted and other European marketplaces.
To make insurance claims, to check my bank statements, etc.
I would be very surprised if it turns out I'm the only one
In my opinion, I think might have to do more with the dark patterns that are created by these apps. DoorDash, Uber. You place an order and there's all these hidden things that get added in you don't really see. You don't really get to recognize unless you do it manually. It's it's trickery in a way. They they try to gouge and get extra fees and costs in there where you can find ways around it if you're clever and able to do so. So using an agent, that just gives them an advantage because then you end up paying the overinflated price and fees plus tokens on top of everything else. See what people are looking for nowadays is actually ways to lower costs. Inflation is too high, and I think people are starting to realize that. They're trying to find ways and find cheaper ways to do things.
“Get me a burrito. Ok cool are there any other places? Ok but how about ones under 50 minutes delivery? Ok now of those which has higher than 4.5 stars? Alright that one looks good, can I get a large lamb burrito with extra salsa and guac? Ok they don’t do lamb that’s fine, beef is good. They don’t do a large size, that’s alright go with a small. Yes confirm payment.”
Text is just not a good format for ordering things. You want to see pictures and just click on the options you want - we’ve had people paid 300k working on the optimal visual interface for this for probably 30 years, just trying to improve the sale rate 2%.
Agents are good for open ended problems which require stringing together lots of different data sources, which couldn’t be further from ordering food.
> Agents are good for open ended problems which require stringing together lots of different data sources, which couldn’t be further from ordering food.
i feel like you were on the right path but arrived at the wrong conclusion. if you think you're right because the blocking factor is text, you arent paying attention
I don’t think it would be good UX with voice either. An agent could dynamically recreate something resembling the DoorDash UI which probably would work, but would lose out on the familiarity the user has with the actual doordash
I mean a text interface - it’s more like if you went to a restaurant and there was no menu so you had to ask the waiter everything, but he also spoke absolutely no English so you had type out your questions on your phone for him - the latency while the model collates the data is not good
I would not trust the AI to order food off of these websites for me because the labeled data itself is pretty much shit. Lots of dishes are unlabeled, have really bad pictures or no pictures at all, and the worse is the ones that have AI generated descriptions which are often wrong or not helpful. I'm totally fine with letting it just use my saved credit cards and delivery address (I assume the AI doesn't see them) but I can't trust it to order the food I actually want.
E: As an example (n = 1 etc): I am vegetarian. I have never ordered meat dishes, ever. Yet all of these food delivery apps suggest meat dishes for me.
doordash is regularly audited for PCI, they almost certainly store raw CC#s and follow modern tokenization standards. The best the agent would see is the name you stored for the card if you have multiple cards it can pick from in the account.
You can pull the PCI compliance documentation from their trust center if you are a partner
https://trust.doordash.com/
For addresses, it's a almost certain the agent would see those since those are visible in the UI when ordering and required for selecting a destination for the order
It's plausible, but also, AI systems have a long history of being plugged in on the wrong side of security boundaries.
Remember when you were able to take over any Instagram account by asking the helpful support AI to send a password reset to an email address of your choice?
>Remember when you were able to take over any Instagram account by asking the helpful support AI to send a password reset to an email address of your choice?
Wow, first I've heard of that. Damages must have been immense for that level of incompetence occasioning financial harm. Or do those laws only apply if you can't hire very expensive lawyers to blame a computer?
It's better they don't because considering how Claude reacts when you give it a meaningless SSH login password for a local box, the moment it learns your CC# and CVV2 it will probably call your bank and cancel the card instead of ordering any food.
> AI, I asked you to check the docs for the latest version of the API, yet you didn't. Why?
> You are completely right! That was my miss, I have no excuse. I've now looked at the docs and implemented it.
Now imagine how triggered you'd be when the AI decides to get you a vegan burger because the chicken wrap is on the second page and it know you're a health conscious person.
Worse than that. Some product manager thought that if they shipped a bunch of buttons that said "Tide" users would keep pressing them and Tide sales would skyrocket. Bet he got promoted for the idea too.
Agreed. I can't imagine trusting it enough to make a purchase automatically, and that's before getting to the reality of how awkward it is. Which brand? Which quantity? Which style (extra strong, extra soft, etc)? Did the price go up since last time? All stuff that you can visually spot in a half second, but would be a huge PITA verbally.
That AI is clearly a product imagined by wealthy tech executives who have personal assistants who shop for them, who trust those personal assistants to buy what they expect for them. The use case doesn't resonate for us normal people, because we do our own shopping, are price sensitive, and typically don't just buy things without doing basic research about what they cost.
Might be a bit reductive, but I think you can probably explain >90% of modern business decisions this way. Being completely out of touch with how a normal person lives seems to have serious impact on just about everything they do.
These people have very different problems than normal people, and they solve them in very different ways. And most of them were born rich, and have always been rich, so they can't even imagine what a normal person's life and needs are. If your target market is also rich executives, then by all means, have your rich executives dream up product features. But now, most of tech are producing solutions for rich tech executives, but hoping that normal people buy them, and they are wondering why normal people don't care.
And it doesn't help that Amazon often doesn't have great pricing on bulky, often fairly low value, consumer staples. (And, in my case, I have a Walmart just down the street so I'm not going to order my Bounty or Charmin from Amazon. The case may be different if you live in a dense city without a car but that's not most people.
Is that true? Amazon reports massive growth in AI and voice commerce. While Echo users appear uncomfortable making big purchases, the segment who routinely use it for stuff like paper towels has been taking off.
I don't know many Echo owners, but the few that I know (n=2) used it to reorder stuff like paper towels.
> There are other signs that voice shopping has never taken off. Fewer than 25% of Amazon Echo owners have ever directly used their devices to make a purchase and fewer than 5% are repeat Alexa shoppers, according to a report last year from Consumer Intelligence Research Partners, which conducts consumer surveys (an Amazon spokesperson said the firm's data was inaccurate and the majority of customers who shop with Alexa are repeat shoppers). And in August 2018, The Information reported that Amazon’s own internal data showed that only 2% of Alexa users had made a purchase so far that year with their voices.
from Amazon Faces Moment of Truth on Alexa as ChatGPT Steals Its Thunder (2023) https://archive.is/2jzve
They are currently showing buy links on Amazon prime in ads they show during their shows after being ad free for years. I can't see anyone being interrupted during their favourite show and then suddenly be interested in buying washing up liquid. Amazon also did those buttons that you clicked to reorder stuff as well.
Ads aren't about making you buy the product immediately. The goal is to make you associate the product category with the product. For example, when you think of washing detergent, which brand do you think of? Of course you think of Tide. Why? Because their advertising works. Which brand makes burgers? McDonald's. What's a refreshing fizzy drink? Coke. This comment is also an advertisement for Tide, McDonald's and Coke because every single time you see them it strengthens your recognition.
The other day I want to have a 1m cable extension male/female for a XH1.25
It is impossible to find one, because you only find kits to make your own, or a 20 or 30cm one.
I tried with several free LLM, so that they can likely watch much more than I can do and filter all kits, and give the cable I want.
Not a single one was able to provide with a link I could use from my location. They kept suggesting that I shall try these "searches", or products, that were not exactly what I asked.
It is a very simple query, and to be fair, it should be solved at the search box, but it isn't.
The truth is that, if I would let it do it without checking now I would have paid for a kit to make the cable or something else that is not what I want.
Even if they did work how much effort would they really save?
Most of the time speaking or writing out precisely what you want in natural language would be more effort than using the systems we have already developed.
In this case, the problem is at the search bar. Because if there is no cable extension for what I want, the search should show me no items. But that is not good for business, so instead, it shows me crap tangentially related to my search.
None of the IA were useful to work against that anti-user pattern, so at the end I just lost my time, and confidence in assign search task for certain products to IA chats.
Is fast food/delivery food so frequently used that this is now warranted?
Even at my most gluttonous, many years ago, I would order maybe a single takeaway every other week, and when I did that, I'd want to be in complete control to browse and try new things. The only use case I can see for AI is as an alternative to traditional search to work out what some unknown ingredient is, however if I recall, most takeaway apps are just pictures with a name.
People who eat fast food more than once a week need to seriously assess how bad this food is for them. It's overly salted, oily and greasy junk with next to no nutritional value. And for what is it, it is ridiculously expensive. The people that eat it often are stuck in a trap.
For less than half of the cost of the lowest value takeaway (around £20.00, although I've seen people carrying bags with receipts up to £50!), you can buy a whole chicken, potatoes and vegetables, which can cover up to 3 or 4 meals. £10 for 3 meals or £20-50 for 1. You just need to put things in ovens and pots and wait, the same as you have to tap on your phone and wait.
The problem with AI assistants in general is that humans barely ever know what they want and the promise is that AI can intuit/predict what we want. It can't. People like to shop. It's easier to shop with our eyes than our ears. Personal assistants, as far as I can tell, have one use case and that is doing mundane chores like e-mail summaries. But to do that, you have to give them access to everything, so it becomes a transaction of privacy. And I think a lot of people are paranoid. Plus each one is a little token bonfire that is probably costing them money.
And I feel like the labs must all know this, so it makes me wonder why they're actually trying to push these assistants onto us. The answer I'm left with is training data — data theft. They'd all violate their privacy terms if it earned them an extra nickel.
Ya, when it comes to things like food I look at the pictures and my sense of taste, along with my emotional state at that moment. AI isn't a great fit here.
Long-time lurker here. I'm probably something of an anomaly at HN because I don't work in anything remotely related to tech - I'm actually a screenwriter. But I enjoy spending time here because the quality of the discourse reminds me of Reddit back in the day.
I consistently get the feeling that I must have a rather more humanist and enchanted view of the world compared to some of you. I see a lot of hyper-rationalist, data-first discussion of the practical issues connected to AI agents when it comes to ordering takeout, but it seems very clear to me that the main reason no-one wants to use AI for this is because a human being's relationship with food - and sourcing food - is really quite ancient and meaningful. In today's hyper-connected world ordering a burger has become almost comically disconnected from hunting for a wild boar, but they are still the same thing in spirit. And handing that over to an LLM equates to the loss of a significant aspect of the human experience.
I think this applies to a lot of use cases of AI that are doomed to fail - not least anything that seeks to replace a human being's creative potential. Why would anyone want to give that up? It's such an important part of existing.
I think that, as a screenwriter, you're even more disconnected from reality than most IT bros here. Reality is not TV, it's mundane, simple and boring. Sometimes people just want to eat something and be done with it as fast as possible.
> DoorDash only rolled out its Model Context Protocol (MCP) connector less than a month ago. ... Without that kind of linkup—which is still only available to a small number of “early beta partners” and mainly used to streamline corporate lunch orders
So it's available to almost no one anyway. Misleading title.
The article does say that AI agents could go through the web interface, but it's not clear if Doordash is counting those orders as AI orders or not. I agree, there's no real information here.
I use AI like a mad man to find what I need on Amazon or other websites.
For example, got a new washing machine, had to find adapters, it is so easy to have it find it for me, and then show me a few options. And understand what I need.
Just had it search for bubble wrap and break down what is most cost effective and gets it to me in 2 to 3 days. So easy, and got me off Amazon.
Food? No way, Food is a pleasure if I am ordering it and a splurge. I don't need a machine to help me pick out what taste good. Maybe translate some things if I'm struggling in that language.
I suppose there is levels to all of these things. For somebody who uses apps to obtain most of their food, this is probably the next step.
Ordering off of DoorDash (or whatever equivalent app elsewhere) in general seems to be the worst possible way to acquire and eat food, in my personal opinion.
Everything on these apps is nutrition-zero junk, filled with salt, oil and sugar, charged at a premium. I ate it in the past, and nowadays I couldn't be paid to eat it. Self-cooked meals beat them in every way, including convenience.
I think the proposition only works if you consistently order the same items from the same restaurant (and so on). It makes the order more predictable ("hey siri, order the same takeout I got from X chinese spot last week").
I don't need to see a menu, prices, or options for that unless I want to deviate from it.
The food delivery app I use occasionally has a reorder button for past orders. I've never used it but I can't imagine it's more of a hassle than typing something to a hallucinating chatbot
Many points were raised, but I believe that key term for what people do when preparing fo buying decison is they prepare "overview" of situation. Price spectrum, sizes, wanted/liked/unlocked ingredients any parameters.
You can't make proper overview without actually browsing menu of one or two providers. AI at best can sloppify you with wall of text or table that you actually don't want to read, because menus and UI are actually better design than random markdown output.
Then AIncsn have tool to output good summary of menu, but people will not trust that this choice was in their interest rather than minmaxing algo of whoever controls agent.
Recently I needed to book a table for 16 for a rehearsal dinner. I used ChatGPT work to find availabilities and create an html doc of only restaurants that could handle our party size, with pictures, menu comparisons, locations, and approximate prices. It knocked the task out of the park and I went with one of the recommended restaurants.
That said, the last mile, the bit where I paid, I called the kitchen manager and talked to them. Even if I trusted ChatGPT with this part, I like building a rapport with who’s serving me and my family food, and it’s a special occasion so I know they want to nail the experience. ChatGPT saved me so many hours of work and research and replaced Google, yelp, and so many other random services.
I don’t think agents are going to work with DoorDash they’re going to replace DoorDash - taking their core competency of helping me discover and choose what’s new and interesting to me, what restaurant is open and meets my criteria and let me stay connected with the people rather than building a wall between me and them
For me, the best use of AI is making bespoke software connecting systems and devices that have no business being connected but I find value in so I can have a unique interface for all my tech and hobbies. Not sure how that gets translated to the everyday man but it sure isn't "bring me food".
Agents are great for that middle ground between just doing it manually and creating an automation to do it. Which strikes me as yet another reason AI is so well suited to software development tasks, but hard to find useful applications outside of software development.
I think eventually demand for this is gonna pick up. I order the same thing every single time(though on a local alternative & not doordash) and I totally wish I could have an agent drive that. At my lunch time ask me if it can order the usual, I say yes it places the order, monitors it - essentially make sure I get my lunch brought to me without - the cognitive overload from interacting with these food delivery apps or in some cases speaking with the delivery people. Yeah - chat might not be the right interface for that there's the MCP and I think more people if they knoew how powerful that was would be excited about the possibilities of building custom workflows
That means the user/customer has to wait until the restaurant/delivery app adds this functionality. Or they could use their agent today to get the same functionality.
Except with most non-AI delivery apps, there’s no straightforward way to just say “repeat my last order” and have it delivered to me. And that’s kind of my point. I don’t want to have to open the app, place the order, track the delivery, or deal with the delivery person. I just want my lunch to show up at the usual time without having to think about any of that.
Well, it could chat with the driver. Where I live the norm is when a driver is assigned your order they get to text you to confirm your location is correct(annoying, I know), they text you again if they are somehow finding it hard to get to your location, they text when they get to your gate for an access code, they text when they get to the front of your house. Thats a lot of texting I'lld gladly let an agent do for me.
I actually do it twice every day. I gave it my preference and time.
Occasionally I steer it to order “something with fish” or “big portion because im hungry”
When I have demoed the use of agents, I usually do it with an agent combining multiple applications' results. Something like: "We're having a family gathering at grandma's. Which of us can stop in at the drugstore to pick up her prescriptions on the way without adding a lot to our travel time?"
Agents are great at moderately complex combinations of data and apps. If I had to do this every day or every week even, it might be worth creating a script suited for a task like that using some automation system. Agents are great at providing a disposable saw when it doesn't make sense to stop and sharpen the saw.
I'm not a doorDash user, but they've been doing it long enough to have an app that's probably highly polished. There's not going to be a lot of upside to speaking or typing an English language command to get what you want. Trying to do that is a waste of a well designed app and the agent's token budget.
I would be extremely cross if I heard that someone gave my location information to some company that runs this stuff. That level of privacy violation should lead to disinheritance.
Well, let me tell you that you should be extremely cross.
Unless nobody knows your address or you’ve signed up for any services, these companies already have your information.
Maybe I am confused but what does the AI do in your example? Isn't that just an instance of Google Maps itself being useful? What does the agent even spend its time doing?
Just because text isn't the best interface for agentic commerce doesn't mean agentic commerce is dead.
The way I'm building my open-source marketplace[0], each store's storefront and cart are rendered right in the chat through MCP UI. So you can ask the agent to change something in your cart or add something, but you also have a real cart in the UI that you can tap and edit directly.
Similar concept as with shopping, where the selling point is "your agent will do all your shopping for you"
But the wide consensus from most of the industry (including AI people) is that agent shopping is useful for stuff you don't like to shop for (like groceries, computer parts, ad-hoc supplies like paper towels)
But for clothes, and interesting things, where the experience is akin to window shopping, scrolling and imagining what you look like in a particular shirt is actually an integral part of the experience.
Guessing that doordash/ubereats has a part of that appeal, where you get to imagine/visualize the food before you order it.
You would imagine maybe personal agents like instinct would drive up this usage. But why order food through 5 text messages when you could do it in five taps?
I work for a payment processor and there's been talk from the bigwigs about making the platform "Ready for agentic commerce".
I have never seen so little enthusiasm for a project before in my entire professional life, and I've worked on some real dud projects. Literally nobody cares to even pretend they think this crap is useful, any discussion I've ever heard on the topic is people memeing on it. As far as I can tell not even the execs talking about it give a shit, which to me shows how utterly useless the whole agentic commerce crap is
This has always been an ai use case that made no sense to me. The UI for ordering food is good, it's visual, it shows you the food you're getting and how much it costs. There's no reason for a chat interface to be an upgrade here. Chat interfaces only have an advantage when you need the nuance of language. It's good at the things where trying to build a UI for it would collapse into an incoherent jumble of visual language.
It's like Netflix- scrolling around looking at previews gives you all the dopamine, by the time you select a movie your brain just craves the phone and it's just background. You don't get doordash because you want to order a good, balanced, healthy meal. You do it because you want to scroll and find something that makes your brain tingle. By the time the food shows up cold 45min later, you're already on to the next thing.
Some of these use case feel so imaginary that lot of people just don't get why would some other people do them. Like with food delivery I want to select specifically what I want and evaluate if the price is right. Same goes for ordering most stuff or deciding on vacation.
Maybe I could get train ticket from AI... Or order taxi. At least until it went wrong for the first time...
"Sure, here's 10 options for different food from this restaurant that you totally couldn't have found just by searching for their website instead of writing this prompt!"
Bots and tech are testing humanity's levels of desire for laziness and how much they are ready to pay for buying that laziness. Turns out that the desire is limitless. As someone said, the ultimate luxury is in having maximum laziness - not having to move, talk, think or use senses - the state of being a rock.
I mean even if I were an AI maximalist and very lazy, I think clicking “reorder” in the DoorDash app is infinitely easier than trying to tell Muse or whatever to order me me last DoorDash meal.
My hot take is capitalism can't deliver a "order one pepperoni pizza" product.
This is literally Pizza Hut flow right now:
- Go to website, look for deals page where pizza is $10 instead of $20.
- Click order, upsell on breadsticks, etc, etc.
- Check out, fees, delivery charge, tip take price from $10 to $20.
- On the receipt page, get SiriusXM offers.
Sellers are just too incentivized to upsell, and over-charge the less transparency there is.
Same for recipes/shopping carts. Can't trust sellers to optimize for minimum price/maximum value.
"you deserve a treat after $event, so I added cheesy garlic bread, Coca Cola, and a new Hershey's Overload dessert -- to undo these changes write a letter to me on a typewriter using headed 160gsm paper"
I would use it if they let me, but you have to be approved for access to their cli and mcp is only for companies. I've had my agent place orders but clicking around with computer use takes longer than ordering by hand.
It's not a super repetitive problem (e.g.respond to 100s of messages) and human judgment is highly valued here (what am I hungry for?) and visuals are sometimes a factor.
Agents are good for complex purchases with lots of hidden fees like hotels. Less useful for burgers, though I'd definitely try it for a large catering order.
This is kind of a moot article because up until a month a go when DoorDash released their MCP, their bot detection was getting in the way of agentic ordering.
I built https://bit.recipes to facilitate my agent ordering my groceries (saves ~60 mins of family annoyance a week). it’s really meant to apply more rails and human/family collaboration, rather than a pure AI play or anything
Because the DoorDash app is so simple, delightful, intuitive?
Look, there's a lot of AI excitement and a lot of it is dumb. But if there's a number I can text "hey get me a pizza" and it re-orders the same pizza order I make every Friday night, I'm going to use it. Would I pay for it? As a standalone service? Obviously not.
But if I could delete half the apps on my phone with their horrid dark-pattern-filled interfaces and constant upsells, I'd love that. I'll happily delegate the interfacing to an agent.
And I'd 100% pay that agent to drop the ads and upsells when DoorDash tells it to pass them along.
Not to mention, searching for food joints is awful. If I want to find authentic Chinese or somewhere with real Bao, I'm going to have to trudge through a hundred pages of Google, Reddit, Yelp, online menus. 90% of the results are garbage and sponsored fast food slop or shadow kitchens.
If I could just ask a single sentence and get back pre-filtered, high-quality answers I would be stoked.
DoorDash seems like a resource anti-optimization that would be made irrelevant by an AI agent managing one's meals. An unofficial HEB MCP [0]—that's cooking with gas!
Give a random chatbot pushed by fomo idiots access to all your personal data and the ability to spend your fucking money? you deserve what you get if you're dumb enough to do that.
While I'm sure there is a place for AI on the food prep side of things, I think it misses the point on the ordering side. While a lot of people want something different, they don't want it to be that different and it's just easier and faster to choose it themselves.
People coming up with these tech use cases live in a reality where price sensitivity isn't a thing.
"You can call an Uber with a voice command"
"You can ask alexa to buy you things"
"Your AI will order food for you"
Seem like magical ideas that will remove friction and increase sales. Except that regular people compare 13 different options to pick the cheapest one. No one wants to see food appear on their doorstep followed by a bill they cannot pay.
> People coming up with these tech use cases live in a reality where price sensitivity isn't a thing.
Amen, there's a worldview difference going on here, and it goes beyond comparative pricing of 2+ choices, and includes other error/reliability issues.
For example, they aren't too concerned with the reservation-cancellation fee when it schedules the wrong fancy dinner date, the restocking-fee for returning the wrong product, the difficulty of getting refunds for the wrong flight, etc.
If it messes up sometimes, well, that's just the price of convenience... but they're able/willing to put a much higher price on convenience than the median consumer.
> If it messes up sometimes, well, that's just the price of convenience...
That seems incredibly inconvenient, though; you then have to sort it out.
Convenience is the root of all evil. I know people say it is money. But what is money if not the ultimate convenience?
Money is a claim on future resources, today that generally means energy / oil.
I don't see money as convenient, honestly money adds a lot of complexity and inconvenience onto my life. What it adds in a good way, though, is power - power to trade hours of my time for stuff I want to buy or services I want to psy for.
the phrase is "the love of money is the root of all evil".
No.
It's the behaviors of humans when they fight over scarce money that you are describing as "evil".
Humans are the root of all evil.
There are lots of evil behaviors that have nothing to do with convenience.
“The fact is that the greatest crimes are caused by excess and not by necessity. Men do not become tyrants in order that they may not suffer cold; and hence great is the honour bestowed, not on him who kills a thief, but on him who kills a tyrant.” - Aristotle
That omits the majority of the casual, daily acts of violence and greed, committed by people to secure their basic needs at the expense of their families and neighbors.
Those falls under non-great crimes, the implicit counterpart to the explicitly mentioned great crimes. It would follow that rectifying those those merely gets one petty honour, rather than great honour.
What? If you tell Opus to be concerned about that it will. And I’d say by default it is way more concerned than I am.
Perhaps you had experience with some old models and crap setups like OpenClaw? But things don’t work like that any more.
I think you've identified the core reason people won't use these tools to make blind purchases, at least those who aren't {m,b}illionaires.
A noteworthy proof of this is the failure of Amazon Dash buttons [1] that blindly ordered your consumables for you. Amazon gave away these devices essentially for free ($5 off with your first order, or some such offer), and people still didn't seem to have been comfortable to use it.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Dash
The buttons had a "dedupe" setting to allow only a single pending item until said item was delivered fwiw.
I really liked the dash buttons for two reasons:
1. It made ordering something you regularly and only buy online anyway easy for an entire household, like for my use case, hookah coals roughly every month.
2. You could place the button next to where you store said consumable and most folks would prefer using it over asking for a link or reminding someone else to re-order.
I do think it was a mistake to launch with an initial limited set of branded buttons for common household goods most people pickup at the store anyway (like detergent) instead of a generic button for my point 1's usecase but thats just plain-old BigTech thinking.
Re 2: I always got a chuckle seeing that "slim jims" were one of the buttons and could envision someone getting into their pantry only to notice they are down to their last 2 slim jims, but thankfully they have a dash button right there to avoid this future disaster.
I never got one, but they certainly made sense in my mind for something like laundry detergent, etc. You notice you are getting low, hit the button, forget about it and 3 days later it shows up and you go "oh, right perfect".
Given later advances in smartphones, I think I'd rather have a little QR code or NFC sticker that encodes "saved product 123".
Then a platform-agnostic open-source app on your phone pulls up the matching entry (e.g. "toilet paper" or whatever) and gives you a fast way to go to the previously-ordered products' page.
Then you aren't bound to any particular vendor, you see prices before ordering, and you could use the same system for other kinds of locationally-bound notes or tasks.
I mean I think the point is that most people want to price check before they just buy something, even if it is the same item on repeat.
Yeah, the price of bulk consumables like paper towels or toilet paper or supplements or detergent regularly changes on Amazon, as does availability of a specific SKU. If you just re-buy the same SKU every time you can end up paying considerably more and/or having your supplier change from Amazon to some random third-party of questionable integrity.
I can imagine an AI agent grappling with all that but the first time a Dash button price gouged me that way I'd throw the thing straight into the trash.
As with smartphone IAPs, this falls apart as soon as it encounters small children who like to press buttons.
I was always surprised and disappointed that Amazon didn’t have some customer-friendly pricing policy with these. For example, that your next Dash order for its associated product would cost $X (and maybe an indication alongside the delivered product of what the next one would cost). That or a small LCD to show the current price. Instead, it just struck me as a “please charge me any number you like” button, and I don’t have anything like enough trust in Amazon (or price insensitivity) to push one of those.
> Ask DoorDash orders “average nearly 50% higher basket value and about 60% more unique items than the same consumers’ traditional orders.”
Really shows why companies salivate over people using these features.
Perhaps a sunk cost thing? "If I'm paying for delivery anyway, I might as well add X..."
Online stores like Amazon already solved that by having a minimum buy for free shipping. People now have more junk in their house because of minimum order for free shipping.
I agree and I think price might be one example of a more general thing which is just that you want to make the decision - based on price and a whole load of other factors that you can't be bothered to explain or may not even be able to articulate to a third party.
I think it's pretty common to actually not want to delegate and just do simple things yourself. It can be satisfying, aside from any of the practical problems it avoids.
Maybe it's a personality thing, maybe it's a learned behaviour thing, but I'm not sure I've met many people I'd imagine being happy just speaking these sorts of things into a phone and seeing what shows up.
Even complex things like travel booking. I have been fortunate enough a few times in my life to have humans whose job it was to help me with things like booking travel, and eventually they did learn my preferences, but there's a ton of nuance that is just hard to explain and doesn't show up in data. There is always a lot of back-and-forth, trial and error, to get aligned on how I want things arranged. Stuff like what time of day I want my flight to be depending on what I had going on the day before. What seat I want on a particular aircraft, vs. a different seat on a different aircraft. What hotel I might prefer, because a restaurant I like happens to be across the street. I've been around long enough to never say never when it comes to technology, but I will say AI agents are not even remotely close to a point where I'd want one to be booking a trip for me. If I don't even want a skilled and experienced human doing it for me most of the time, the bar is very high for software.
> What seat I want on a particular aircraft, vs. a different seat on a different aircraft.
This seems really strange to me? I have preferences on seats too, but they largely boil down to “I want to be at the front to deplane faster” and “I want a bulkhead or emergency seat for leg room” and “I prefer aisle seat”. I can communicate those preferences and a human booking my flight can balance them regardless of specific airframe.
> This seems really strange to me?
As someone who flies between Australia and the US 3-4 times a year, not at all.
I want leg room and the ability to sleep with my head against the wall of the aircraft, but I want to be away from galleys and toilets and not in a seat where the overhead locker closest to me is reserved for crew equipment.
Ok the seat at the front is 40% more, do you still want it? Or you've got a layover of 3 hours anyway, do you still need it? Or it's only available on an airline you had a bad experience with, or you're checking luggage so have to wait for that anyway...
There's so much nuance to these things
Some seats have no window or they have the thick bar between the windows right beside your shoulder which is really uncomfortable
People like looking at pictures of food and choosing lunch, and talking to a robot sucks. It doesn't need a whole lot of analysis I don't think.
People like knowing the price of something before spending the money. Companies like the opposite, for people not to know.
This proves, yet again, how accurate the AI labs' talk of "money won't matter" is.
If companies pushing these agents find they're reliably making customers overpay by about ~30%, I wonder why they don't run some sort of subsidy (from their pocket) where like orders placed by your AI are 30% off.
Certainly feels less gameable than the kind of stuff we already see so much of (like referral bonuses, free sign-up balance, "unlimited" promos, etc)
My wife is a dentist. She brings her lunch because its cost effective. Her assistants all order door dash, _regularly_.
> Except that regular people compare 13 different options to pick the cheapest one.
Which takes time... and the AI can do that for you, presumably? Do I trust AI _right now_ to do that _for me_? No. Will people try it out and invariably work out the kinks, for a stable set of use cases? Definitely. Screens are just one UI for ordering stuff. There's definitely a market for doing the same thing with minimal or no screen time.
I just can’t see this ever being common. It sounds terrible. Imagine phoning a number, a person answers and you attempt to relay and negotiate a food delivery order through them, in what world is that better than browsing an app? We don’t have to imagine, this is what we used to do. It sucked and almost everyone stopped doing it in favour of browsing an app. It’s just a superior interface for that sort of thing, it’s already as good as it needs to be.
Funny, I much prefer ordering food by phone call than using apps or websites. I find it much quicker and less error prone.
Different use cases, if the apps don't offer what you need because it's uncommon or custom, then the call is superior, apps can't offer every option, so you default back to messaging and a back and forth, at which point you do want realtime communication
So you need to know exactly what you want to order? People rarely order food like that in my opinion. The majority of the time people like to browse menus and consider the options. In that scenario the voice chat interface is absolutely terrible. “Remind me again of the option you presented to me 3 minutes ago? No not that one, list them again. No I don’t need to know the full item description with all ingredients, just be brief!” and so on. It’s just not an efficient way to relay that type of data.
I am not sure what kind of restaurant you're thinking about where it is impossible to put every food option into an app.
If you think about the logistics of running a decent kitchen, the set is quite limited in the first place.
> My wife is a dentist. She brings her lunch because its cost effective. Her assistants all order door dash, _regularly_.
Ah, this is the new marshmallow test, except instead of "can you leave a marshmallow uneaten on the table" it's "can you avoid summoning a taxi to take a single marshmallow to your house".
(Bluesky calls this "burrito taxi discourse"; I do notice that a lot of the people who claim that delivery is absolutely essential to them give an impression of privileged learned helplessness while at the same time claiming to be poor. Perhaps that's unfair, or perhaps not. I'm just a higher earning middle aged professional like the rest of HN, who rarely orders delivery food)
This is common because there's probably some other, major time savings things that your wife is able to spend money on that lets her have a reliable stock of food that she can plan and prepare for her lunch.
AI or not, ordering any food delivered takes time to deal with and collect. When your food is already there, you can pick the exact second you want to eat lunch and not wait 30 or 45 minutes for someone else's delivery time frame to match yours.
Beyond time, I will go out of my way to make larger portions for leftovers because I know what's in the food I make, and I try to make healthy food. Even "healthy" options from places that deliver aren't always that healthy. There's an element of knowledge about what I eat that is equal to cost savings in my mind.
Meal prep takes your time. Meal delivery is asynchronous. If you don't have the time to meal prep, then you don't.
> AI or not, ordering any food delivered takes time to deal with and collect.
It is few taps in an app and going out for it when it arrives. Literally. And while you are at work anyway. Cooking, shopping and packing take more time - and at the time when you could have been doing something more pleasurable (like chilling with netflix).
Only when framed that way. Different strokes for different folks. Some people actually enjoy cooking. Being in the room and providing for people. Thinking about the recipe and how it came out this time vs last time, and what to change next time to make it just so. Being taken to a Michelin star restaurant is an experience that I will never forget.
>When your food is already there, you can pick the exact second you want to eat lunch
Yes but you have to spend time making it beforehand dummy. (Not saying it's not fiscally irresponsible to get delivery for lunch every day, but you're obviously missing the point of the convenience)
Habit + planning + preparing food in bulk can save a lot of time and money. If you're already in the kitchen preparing a Sunday evening meal, you can scale that up a bit and have a few extra lunches ready without much additional effort.
>Will people try it out and invariably work out the kinks, for a stable set of use cases? Definitely.
Trust and incentives aren't thinks you can prepare a test suit with 100% code coverage for. The perverse incentives to serve me what the highest sponsored bidder paid for is too strong, and there's to little guardrails right now to protect against that eventuality. Therefore, I do not trust the process no matter how battletested. Enshittification will eventually veer it off course anyway.
You want my trust, you need to add guardrails (with teeth on them) or change the incentive to not screw me over.
What’s your logic behind agents being worse at this than humans?
My agent routinely does comparison shopping across various sites to filter out according to my criteria, and even finds coupons - something I never bothered to do.
I would say that especially when you are price sensitive, agentic shopping should be your thing.
If an AI company ordered expensive food without your full consent would they be liable to pay instead of you?
By giving the AI your password you have given that consent. Willing to bet it is written down in the terms of service as well.
Consent doesn't actually work that way. Maybe between you and doordash but not between you and the agent company.
It 100% works that way. Sorry your Dot bought you a $24 Mr Beast burger.
Did you give them your payment information? You might be liable...
This stems from the differences in median income of people coming up with these tools and the target audience/median consumer, i.e. these people are out of touch
I remember meetings with our M$ management when I was at Wunderlist (after the acquisition) singing the praises of Cortana and "smart inboxes".
The disconnect was almost comical. All the engineers and other regular employees had "eeew, get it away from me" on their faces, and the sentiment was "how much do I have to pay to not get this?"
The managers, on the other hand...I don't know how to describe it. What they exuded was something along the lines of a religious or probably more accurately cultish experience. They had been on the mountain, they had seen the light, the future had spoken to them, and they were preaching the gospel.
And it didn't seem like they were faking it, either.
Couldn’t the agent do the comparison for you? And couldn’t you give it more complex constraints? E.g. instead of saying “order an uber to the airport”, you’d say “order a rideshare to the airport if it’s under $40 and less than a 10 minute wait”
By the time you've specified your preferences specifically enough for the agent to do what you want, you may as well have done it yourself.
Agents seem like they might be helpful for high-friction tasks, with a lot of data. But summoning Ubers and ordering food aren't really that.
Summoning Ubers arguably is a great use case because at airports you're probably busy moving to the pickup point and dealing with spotty signal on the way there. Comparing multiple services by hand in that environment is kind of a pain in the ass. It would be great to instead use an agent that is probably talking to their APIs to do this faster, and I can focus on other things at that moment like texting whoever I'm seeing.
So astoundingly marginal. Seriously wondering how many Meta astroturfers are in here with some of these posts
What would be great would be a unified car ride app which accessed all vendors. The AI layer adds nothing, I would say detracts actually, and it would not be more popular. UI is just superior to chat in many, many applications.
I think you're just in your own bubble of how people use technology. I hate typing and looking at a screen while in motion. I can absolutely imagine myself using voice mode at home saying "I need a ride to X destination, leaving home within 30 minutes, just me in the car, check Uber Lyft and Waymo and book the cheapest one."
I don't have any kind of agent set up to do that now, but to me that sounds like removed friction even if I use it just a few times a year.
I constantly use the Ask AI thing in Google maps to tell it a complex route involving biking and transit and needing to be at a certain place at a certain time. It hasn't messed up on me yet. I would much rather specify the question in natural language than type anything into a rule based UI. In fact I built a toy app years ago that handled a few of my most common queries with the Maps API and I still never used it because of the friction.
Siri has been able to book you a ride share since iOS 18 without needing an LLM. Generic speech recognition is fine for what you need.
We’ll see.
It takes 30 seconds to check both uber and lyft. 45 seconds adding waymo to the mix. You want to pay for a service to save you 45 seconds. And thats the best case. Worst case it screws up an address and that isn’t unlikely either.
It does not in fact take 30 seconds to check uber alone even when you have good signal - and correctly copy the address every time without deleting it by accident, not having to restart the app because it times out and won't let you back to the search bar, etc.
The whole point of agents for this kind of stuff is to not have to think about it so you can focus on something more important than a mobile app failing to compute its core function alongside the other nonsense it's doing. And no it doesn't screw up the address either, this isn't 2021 anymore.
So in this low cell signal situation the gigantic bloated ai solution will book a rideshare for you? When the first party apps can’t even connect to their servers?
most airports in the US have good cell service. you book the uber as the plane parks. you meet your uber driver at the rideshare pickup area. i fly a lot; this is what most people do
Which is the stupidest fucking thing ever. There should just be a line of cars waiting to pick you up and you get in line and that car drives you to your destination. Aka a taxi stand, just with technology. Get in the car, the driver scans a QR code on your phone that was generated by you, telling the driver where to go. The reason we can't just do that is because taxi laws are stupid and Ubers are not a taxi so we're forced to play that stupid game because money and power and politics so things remain stupid until the person in power blocking progress ages out aka dies of old age.
What’s missing from this is also the choice of the rideshare driver. Maybe they don’t want to take you 30 miles to your destination. Maybe your destination is in an area of no business so it’ll cost more for them to get back to a place they’ll find another fare.
The rideshare race to the bottom model of pricing has some bad aspects to it, but choice for the driver before accepting the trip is one positive.
That is exactly how it works at airports in India
> There should just be a line of cars waiting to pick you up and you get in line and that car ...
This one is not law. That absolutely exists ... but airports demand money for taxis to join that line of customers and so these got more expensive and are never the cheap option.
taxi lobby f*ed up a golden opportunity there
maybe but this is an AI chatbot inside Uber that will not consider other services. And your own claw will not get an API to be able to compare. Can you imagine the horror on the providers faces if you suggest such idea.
If you’re that price conscious, take the bus. Or just get in the line for an actual taxi. The last time I tried to get ride share at the airport the drivers all declined them to drive up the price. I started getting offers for 200, I just went and got a taxi for 50.
yes, it's like using a company travel agent. doesn't save you any time really, once you have specified all your constraints.
UX/HCI researchers have been harping on "recollection vs recall" for like 50 years now, and we're throwing it all away. When your web form is replaced with an AI agent, not only does your user need to remember what the form looked like, now they have to type/say it all over again! Holy friction Batman!
> Thinking... The user told me to stick to a $40 maximum. I need to determine if that's a hard limit or a suggestion. Perhaps the user is doing price comparison for an exercise. I'll order 3 different ubers and let the user decide which to board when they arrive. They said a $40 limit, but that's just for the ride - I shouldn't factor in the cancellation fees.
Where do the constraints come from? When I do something like order an Uber to the airport, I don't typically game out in advance the full decision tree of what things I might see on the app to make me change my mind.
> Couldn’t the agent do the comparison for you?
Maybe. But we need to invent a SOTA model that can reliably count to four first.
It's a classic example of a task that AI cannot do better than humans (because it's quite simple to do manually and the AI doesn't know what that human craves in that moment), and personal stakes (if it fucks up, you'll have to eat something you don't like or go hungry for a while - people tend to feel viscerally about their food).
My mother isn't even poor (decent pension) but she asks a neighbour to drive her to the hospital instead of a 50 euro Uber. A taxi is basically the last resort.
> No one wants to see food appear on their doorstep followed by a bill they cannot pay.
This is why you can finance Chipotle orders with Klarna
Also, such use cases are an artifact of the designer being too deep into the personal optimization cult.
I want to have 30' time to spend cooking my effing dinner, not save 5' on my DoorDash order. Is that too much to ask these days?
I like the ones that feature new AI browsers or operating systems. They will try to tell you how cool is it that you can just highlight something on the screen and/or type in a prompt, and have some 2D or 3D interactive visualizations pop up. Literally the most useless, inelegant things imaginable.
They would be reasonable things if you could trust the provider.
The Amazon buttons were a cool idea, except my assumption is that Amazon would rip me off if I used them.
I’d probably trust a system like that with Costco.
I think this has been a trope of how detached SV has been from the real world for a while. Google has shown this demos for ages where their AI books you a flight with no friction, as if people wouldn’t have a gazillion tabs open with skyscanner, kayak, trip.com, google flights…
We buy our household stuff through our household agent. Very simple. It does the research, matches inventory, and browses to Amazon and buys things. Other sites it volunteers information. Overall, I’m a fan.
It’s not for everyone clearly but it’s pretty good. Wife also downloaded Muse the other day (really, how dare she betray me like this) to do a Facebook marketplace thing. Worked great. Other guy didn’t speak a lick of English and she didn’t speak the least Spanish. Another sale that went perfectly.
How does it track inventory?
Nothing smart. I photograph the closet occasionally like “do you see the X?” when I put something away, or a Costco purchase receipt. And it obviously has Amazon. It has cameras through the house but never uses them for this.
It’s kinda vibes based. “You’re at Costco. You last bought X”.
What freaks me out is the canonical "AI planned my entire vacation itinerary" example. I don't think I ever pay as much attention to anything in life as I do when I'm picking flights and hotels. Travel plans will be the very last thing I farm out to AI.
I'm fine delegating my programming work to a clanker, even accounting, but come on. The clanker isn't going to have to deal with the consequences of booking $40,000 airplane trips to hotels full of bedbugs.
I use it extensively once im at a destination to generate ideas for where to go and what to see based on my interests and likes and dislikes, e.g "I'm in X city for the next 3 days, and I enjoy hiking and wwii history, what are some things to do?" "my mother in law and wife want to take a daytrip in region X, whats a good day plan given my MIL cant walk or hike far and my wife wants to take photos of scenic views?" I've gotten some great off-the-beaten-path suggestions this way.
But yeah im not using to book flights or hotels.
That's how most of us use AI for planning vacations, i.e. as a (better, by this point) replacement for Google Search.
and to create bullet lists about what they (probably) need to pack
(reusing bullets lists you carefully handcrafted for yourself would probably be better but that is another topic)
I see that a lot, and it's mind-boggling. If someone says "AI planned my vacation", I give it roughly:
I use AI extensively in my trips. It’s not that I literally prompt ChatGPT and then walk away while it books everything. It’s just a search engine on steroids that I use to generate ideas and collate options until I choose the things I want.
That's very much not "AI planned my vacation"
Does "I'm going to visit X city, show me a list of interesting place prepare me a schedule to visit them for X days" fit ? Because that's what i'm doing.
I think in the context of kbelder's original comment, it refers more to people having AI do the actual booking / handling payments, though I'd say you're getting there if you're having it pick out places for you. At that point you're just risking your time, not your wallet, which is easier to believe.
I read "Planning" as it will show me a plan, the decision to follow it or not is mine, not it will handle all the process (booking, purchasing).
And yes there is risk with its scheduling, but it's not like i will do any better, travelling has always come with risk in scheduling
I used AI to plan out my vacation. It helpfully suggested some improvements too
I certainly did not have AI do the bookings for my vacation though. Is that what you meant?
planned & booked are not the same, I fear my sister very much has planned any vacation she did in recent times with AI. Just not booked it that way. And also planned doesn't mean no human in the loop, either.
Or it's a bit for the 'gram. Influencer Tech.unicorn gave AI a budget and asked it to make her birthday special. https://www.instagram.com/p/Dej2T6PmzwX/
Do you mean planning, or do you mean booking? Those are two very different things.
I use AI to plan stuff all the time, but then I book it all myself.
Planning != booking.
If people are that rich don't they just have a person to plan that shit for them?
People don't, in general, plan my trips for me but I do long distance walking trips in areas where it's useful to have some specialist on-the-ground knowlege so I use companies that specialize in that sort of thing. Book my own air and urban hotels though.
People use AI whether they believe it or not. Think you found a hidden deal, and hidden cheap flight, leading you to a hidden matcha cafe with a hidden view? Think again! The booking company which is owned by a booking company which is owned by a booking company wanted you to find it.
I’ve found plenty of hidden things by just wandering around in the real world - I’d bet most of them weren’t pushed by AI.
Something that is perhaps “underreported” is that a lot of AI solutions aren’t easier to do than just doing the thing.
My budget app, for example: It’s not easier for me to ask the AI bot “show me all my transactions from McDonald’s” than it is to click on the search bar/payee filter and type “McDonald’s.”
But if I use the AI bot, I’m burning tokens.
Not just not easier, but also a lot slower.
The UX experience for basically all LLMs that I've interacted with is having the AI sneak in where I don't want it and end up taking 10 extra seconds to do what used to be a 0.1ms operation.
The worst place for AI is in search bars, yet that seems to be the first place every product manager wants to put it. I hate waiting forever to get results because AI is poorly searching in the foreground.
I feel like I have to keep reminding people at work that LLMs are more expensive and have higher latency and less predictable behavior than plain old deterministic software.
Those tradeoffs must be considered when deciding whether a feature requires regular software or AI.
I had a fun day at the office pointing out that using an AI to edit the lighting in photos of an event also had it do creative things like make the speaker smile bigger and remove her wedding band and also make the eyes of the C-suite listening more open.
A few repeats of the same initial light adjustment and she had a big joker grin and the CEO had giant anime eyes and looked 25 years younger.
Now, if we were to do this first "fix the light" pass on every publicity photo, what would it be adding and taking away without our knowledge? I fundamentally don't like using a tool that will do other things than what I want it to do, without even warning me. The consequences of a noticeable fuckup will be on me, not on the machine, so I'd rather adjust the slider myself thank you.
In contrast, Confluence's AI bot has been a huge help to me.
... One wonders if that is due to the great implementation of the bot, or due to the less than stellar results of confluence search.
That’s because a full turn with the AI takes about as long as Confluence does to respond to a click.
In Bitbucket, Rovo tells me it can’t write a PR description because it can’t see the code.
It does automatically write the PR in the first place but if you delete that description then try to have Rovo make a new one it fails hard.
Gemini in Google Docs/Workspace is so frustrating like this. I can get Claude to manipulate a Google Doc using the API, no problem, but talk to Gemini, the AI agent in the same browser window and it says it can't do anything [0]
[0] as of a couple of months ago when I last tried reformatting a slide deck using Gemini (failed) and then Claude (succeeded)
For your protection, citizen.
In contrast, Confluence's AI bot is a living nightmare to me.
Rovo makes changes I don't want that I have to undo and its "search" is bafflingly low quality compared to the old search experience, but most of all it just makes every page take longer to load and puts annoying UI elements in the way of what I actually want to interact with.
It mirrors every single other in-app AI bot experience I've had to date - less useful than the functionality they replaced with it, slow and annoying.
I’m a heavy AI user at work and I agree, Atlassian’s bot is painful. It’s also “gullible.” It will fail to do something and then just assume it cannot, that it cannot create pages or make issues or whatever.
The only one I’ve enjoyed is Grafana’s. It’s been a joy to use tbh.
The fail to refusal pipeline is frustratingly common with these in-app agents.
The “copilot” instances built into Microsoft’s programs are almost entirely useless due to this.
We got something called "glean". It is better than Confluence search, because confluence search is utter crap. It's just a keyword scan with no concept of relevance.
I had a conversation the other day with some who told me that one very useful thing with AI now is that you can use it to find hotels in a city. My obvious reaction was that this has been a one or two button press thing on google maps for a very long time. They replied well yeah but now with AI you can tell it to only find rooms that don't go over a certain price.
I think a good chunk of people just do not ever try to understand what buttons do, ever, and it's maddening.
And a bunch of the times these assistants can't actually do what you can do with the buttons anyway.
I experienced it this morning asking for Google maps to be set to alerts-only mode: "I'm sorry, I can only turn voice guidance fully on or fully off."
Going to the grocery store is a similar example. For a while I was big on getting my groceries delivered. But then I started to realize that the amount of time it took to fill my cart was basically the same amount of time it took in the actual store, so I wasn’t really saving much time or convenience at all… plus I was missing out on some intrinsic joy of discovering and picking things myself.
Up thread I just made a comment about how for some things I see talking verbally to an AI agent as the lowest friction solution, but I think I'll always be a physical grocery store browsing guy. I got groceries delivered a few times, years ago when my wife and I had covid at the same time. The experience was worse in every way for me than going down the aisles and putting things in my cart.
Agreed, I also enjoy going through the line and making small talk with the cashier. Mostly because of remote work post-COVID. We have delivery this year with a newborn in the house, but now that they are almost 1 I don't think I am going to renew.
> click on the search bar/payee filter and type “McDonald’s.” Sure but you still have to open a dedicated app and that the search is just a string search.
I recently setup Muse (just seems to have the easiest out of the box connectors) to connect to all my accounts over Plaid. I can ask questions like: * Review all recurring transactions. * Show overview of last 12 months of spending by category. * Review last months CC transactions. * Estimate next months expenses.
And then in the same app, I automatically get personal financial and budget information that's actual useful. I can adjust the frequency and type of content just by updating the agent's goal.
I tried using YNAB. It felt so cumbersome compared to just asking AI for the info. I had to make a $300 fake expense to zero out an account minimium balance, I can't treat an investment account as a spending account (without some weird hacks).
Meanwhile, the same AI can cleanup my email inbox, watch my calendar, etc.
And I spent like ~2 days having Claude (over remote-control) create a Monte-Carlo simulation for retirement (including Tax calculations). Works great, I can read the code and make whatever changes I need.
The most friction I still encounter is the connector itself being too opinionated. Plaid's API tries to predict future expenses based on what's detected as a recurring charge; this of course was incorrect if similar Amazon.com charge amounts occur on similar days.
IMO purpose built apps are dead. A sandbox of tools that AI can use is far more flexible. Spending $20/month only needs to replace 3-4 other paid single purpose apps (or identify a single $20 recurring service to cancel) to be net-positive. Plus you don't have to configure it, just ask questions.
But that's you, a developer, who not only understands what they actually _need_ in order to have a good budgeting app and retirement planning app, for lack of a better word, but also are willing to spend the time setting it up, understand how it functions, and get it functional.
> And I spent like ~2 days having Claude (over remote-control) create a Monte-Carlo simulation for retirement (including Tax calculations). Works great, I can read the code and make whatever changes I need.
This is the biggest indicator of the divide between the AI-enthusiastic developer and the average person.
The average person isn’t going to want to sit down and spend two days to fine-tune code or a spreadsheet to accomplish this. They want an easy-to-navigate interface that is dead-simple and ready to go with the ability to get an answer done in five minutes or less. If they hit any snags in the first 30 seconds they’ll ditch it and move to the next solution. Why should they have to spend their time creating a duplicate solution when there are so many ready-to-go alternatives already out there? They want the path of least resistance.
True, but by "two days" I mean I asked Claude to do it from my phone while watching TV in the evening after work.
I think for people who can quickly understand and describe systems/code, AI is very magical. So many personal projects would be otherwise too tiring except for the 0.1% OSS developer personality that can spend 4+ hours a day working on stuff. Now AI means many projects can be implemented at the speed of thought.
Even still, the average person is going to have no idea how to prompt for such a thing. Do you think normal people know what monte-carlo simulations are?
I still use Monarch Money (similar to YNAB) but any time I have a real question I just download my data and ask Claude Code questions about my transactions. It works very well and it's not much effort.
> Something that is perhaps “underreported” is that a lot of AI solutions aren’t easier to do than just doing the thing.
Even apps can be strictly worse than lower tech solutions.
A local car service I can text with “I need a car to airport XYZ tomorrow at 7am” beats every app flow.
Until they are a no-call no-show at 5am to go to the airport. Then you’re a Rideshare Co customer for life because there’s tracking and they will keep you in the loop.
Look at this person who has never been screwed by Rideshare Co before.
I have never had my car service miss a pickup in 20 years. (Though I've slept through an alarm clock a couple of times.) But, then I don't really have reliable Uber or taxi service where I live.
I sat through an egregious demo of an AI add on for documentation. The flow was load doc (e.g. pdf) -> data filled into a specialized form view. To really wow me, they showed how I could type in the AI chat interface "change the title to 'abc'" and then it would make the change in the form view.
Why can I not just type the new name into the title field itself? Well, this is supposedly easier and in time the AI will learn and get the title right 100% of the time, so there won't be a need for me to edit it.
This is a major player in the industry, not some random kid.
This is where I see a lot of AI stuff right now honestly.
It's just "I want the computer to figure this out for me even if it takes longer than the old tools, because I cannot be bothered to learn how to use the old tools"
I've encountered this a lot
And then there’s the mindset of “the existing toolsets don’t fit my mindset very well, so I’ll have AI recreate them in a way that only makes sense to me and then harass everyone to adopt the new tool because I understand it.”
Someone didn’t like how our Jira tickets and Confluence docs were structured so they vibe-coded a new ticketing system that has a custom web UI with a Microsoft Access database on the back-end. Management and Customers don’t like it for a good range of reasons but he requires everyone who works on his projects to use it.
Another person didn’t like our build script for generating a templated Ansible role so they made some kind of MCP adapter or harness to ask you canned questions on what your role is named and what features to include, then scrapes our docs to get the required directory structure and generates it. It does literally the same thing but sometimes does it wrong and consumes tokens regardless.
It’s like the XKCD comic about competing standards, but accelerated for any person who is minorly inconvenienced and has API tokens to an AI service.
I think though if you re-phrase this to “I am lazy…” (the CORE common trait of every great SWE I have priviledge of working with in the last 30 years) “… and I do not want to manually do any work I can automate” things look a lot different through that lens
Yahoo Mail tried to add an "AI summary" to the top of all emails. The two line summary was worse than merely reading the two lines in the original email.
There's a symmetry to things that happened in the mid-aughts as at that time there were some shifts in computing habits as well. For instance I knew a bunch of folks at the time who, instead of typing "www.website.com" into the URL bar, would open up google and type "www.website.com" and then click the top link.
I'd ask why and they'd just shrug, like *obviously* google is the front page for everything on the web.
Your anecdote is spot on and it feels like the people who are doing things that way are channeling similar energy.
its a classical effect of having a hammer and recognising everything as a nail to whack. its pretty tricky to find a problem well suited to a tool like LLMs.
i programming stuff using LLM of which the resultant programs are deterministic and dont use LLMs or tokens is a better or easier approach to having gains. because the resulting program can be easier to use and doesnt cost a lot to run. Automations are a good target, or integratig libraries into other programs. tedious things u know well how to do but take time to do manually. then once done fix a problem or workflow that u need fixed by the solution yielded.
ive not seen 1 app that does calls to an LLM that i find useful, apart from harnesses that produce code (which is only recently becoming more appealing and might depend on how good and fast u can write code, at which im not the best nor the fastest.)
My wife has to submit a bunch of translated documents for procurement processes. Noone really reads those but they are a hard requirement. These are usually in DOCX or sometimes PDF with tables, product images etc. So I built her a little applet which (after clicking two buttons) sends the XML or PDF to an LLM in chunks and it spits back the same structure but with translated text. Of course there are edge cases where it doesn’t work perfectly but I’d say it works 95% of the time in a good enough quality to submit them. Saves her roughly 0.5-1 hour per job and much cheaper than other alternatives.
I’m doing something similar at work. Thousands of contracts, need to extract billing terms/logic. It’s scattered throughout each contract but has no summary, each contract can be hundreds of pages of non applicable legalese. The problem is, once I run it, can I trust the output without manual verification? How will I know if it skipped/missed something from a contract?
Recently laid off and not a big AI guy… but to illustrate your points:
Tailoring + proofing resumes to _manually_ apply to jobs is a great application of LLMs in my experience. But I wouldn’t want an AI to apply for jobs for me.
Funny thing about that. This time last year I was applying for jobs and kept my same old latex generated flawed human resume that I’ve been using 20 years or so.
Recruiters said it was standing out in the tech sector. Apparently AI likes to embellish way too much so you don’t trust it.
Or they just flat out don't work. I was on an insurance website recently, and getting big annoying popups to use their AI agent for help with the site or my plan, even encouraging me to ask questions about my plan. I did have one, very simple, "what's my plan's copay?"
"Sorry, I do not have that information."
So then, "Ok, where do I find it?"
"Sorry, I do not have that information."
What the hell? What is this for? Of course, someone will point out "it's because of regulations" or some technical limitation, sure, I can understand that, but then I must ask the question then why did you think it was worth building?
I called my dentist because I was sick and wanted to move my appointment. You can't talk to a human anymore, it's all ai, after a bit of back and forth it assured me it had canceled my appointment and booked a new one 2 days later. I was actually surprised it went so well
The next day I get an email at 7pm telling my appointment was successfully rescheduled for 1pm (the same day), none of these match either my og appointment nor the rescheduled one
When I went to the dentist for the appointment the ai assistant supposedly rebooked, they told me there was a mistake and I was assigned a kids dentist.
In the end I had to rebook a third appointment with the receptionist
Dentists are plentiful and none of them really know what they are doing (see recent experiment posted here on HN that has The data to support this asserrion).
I switch at the slightest sign of friction.
I was dealing with a LLM help bot on a website where I had to upload some documents and asked the bot how to get through a step where I simply don't have the right things and it kept telling me I could sidestep that (but I could not) or upload the thing (which I told it I could not to begin with!).
It's not like the previous tree based bots were good but at least they had a path to speaking with a person.
I suspect nobody ever tried to use the bot.
I've had the bot of a "modern" holiday home tell me some rubbish about luggage storage. Fortunately, I knew that there would be a human fallback during working hours so it worked out OK. But who thought that it was a good idea to have a shitty bot to ask about important things?
It's being sold everywhere to people fed up with dealing with other people who waste their time. Because that really IS a problem.
Most (Note: Not all!) questions you get when you work in a "customer service" role come from lazy, unobservant, or dumb people. So pre-AI, a large business needs an army of people to answer the phone and do things like walking confused people through, step-by-step, how to reset their password. "Did you check your email? Did you check the Spam folder? Did you give it 5-10 minutes?"
So AI is sold with the promise that you can just put it in front of your human agents, and then you'll only need 1/5 the staff (let's set aside the unfortunate economic implications for the other 80%) because most people's questions are stupid and trivial to solve.
Problem is, the dummies can't identify and divert themselves to the bot up front, so the person who loses most (other than the CS agents who lost their jobs) is people like you or me, who only contact customer service when we are reasonably sure there is no way to solve our own problem on the website/the app/by ourselves. We have to argue with a bot which is prompted "You're about to hear from a dummy whose main problem is most likely that he hasn't read any of our ZenDesk support articles, can't operate our website or a computer properly... and he probably has an IQ of 75. Send him answers from the FAQ -- repeatedly if needed -- and try to get him to go away. Don't give up, and don't escalate to an agent unless very specific criteria are met."
FWIW, my question would have been in any decent FAQ but there wasn't one. It was simply: I have to return my keycard when leaving the room in the morning, but I need to store some luggage until the early evening. How do I get into the building and into the storage room? IIRC, the main door was just open at daytime, but the luggage room needed a keycard (really smart system, you clowns). The bot advised to just keep the keycard and use it for pickup. Of course it didn't work anymore after checkout time. Fortunately, there was a guard / service person when I came to pick up my stuff and I more or less knew that in advance based on previous days.
> the person who loses most (other than the CS agents who lost their jobs) is people like you or me, who only contact customer service when we are reasonably sure there is no way to solve our own problem on the website/the app/by ourselves.
I do wish this were real: https://xkcd.com/806/
Actually, maybe it could become real if we benignly "poison" enough online sources so that LLMs actually do it...
Once is a fairly long while, I do have a duh moment. But usually I hesitate and hesitate because i'm sure I'll get some low-level CS person working from a script. The upside such as it is is that I'm (rarely) pleasantly surprised.
I had a bot tell me to click something in the chat when it had sent me an email... The whole experience was so bad that the company behind it lost my business.
seems to me like having a chatbot is the 2020s version of the 2000s "having a website" or 2010s "having a facebook page"
except it's worse, if you manage to get some info out of it, it could all be just hallucinated, you were told a lie and no one is responsible.
it's like the only purpose is to erect a barrier between the company and its clients.
They’re building very little. They’ve been sold/told AI is good at customer service. They usually only bother pointing it to their knowledge base and FAQs and can only really answer questions if the answer is in that
I think to some extent it's possible to reduce cognitive load even on these simpler actions just because you have to see less unrelated data on what you asked about. I say this as someone who doesn't really use LLM integrations.
And these type of requests consume very little tokens in comparison to almost any programming work.
But asking yourself "can I trust this information?" is the baseline amount of cognitive load added to the interaction.
Depending on the level of trust or importance of the decision this may already be a fairly high bar to clear before being able to claim any overall reductions in the interactions itself.
Yes, I definitely agree. Though there's a lot more stuff that I can trust them with nowadays, that I couldn't before.
An AI bot can jump straight to the thing you want, like "How much did I spend at McDonalds over the last year?"
It's worth considering whether you really want the full list of MCD transactions or is that just a step you're used to as a means to getting the answer you want.
So can grep
I'm not sure about what you use but my primary credit card (a major American bank) has an incredibly annoying interface for searching previous transactions.
That's the whole point. Convert the most basic and mundane thing into a revenue-generating subscription.
Cognitive load. To get something out of a computer pre-ai you needed to enter precise command. Sometimes too precise - looking at you tar.
Here you can phrase it anyway you like and even typo at writing mcdonalds won't stop the machine from giving you the right answer.
That's how I feel about LLMs for programming, too. I've tried using them to write programs for me, but every time, when I finish up it winds up being a wash in terms of time+effort, or it took more time+effort than just writing it myself.
Okay, now do "all my transactions this year for retail stores"? Or "All luxury / deductible purchases"?
Of course when you arbitrarily limit the problem domain to some specific example, you can make any tool seem pointless and stupid. It's when you expand your goals to things that aren't trivial that you get benefits.
Do we need not Mathematica or NumPy because calculators can add just fine?
The funny thing is that these expanded examples were already features in the budget app I use before AI came along.
What’s the budget app that lets you ask for transactions at luxury stores? Or retail establishments vs online?
What frustrates me is that there's the potential to bake much more information into transaction history.
There's a huge spec (Level III data) that lets the merchant provide full line item detail with every credit card purchase.
Corporate cards get it, but consumers don't. The payment ecosystem often doesn't even submit it if the card isn't identified as a corporate card.
If you had that, you'd probably need way less "smarts" to build budgeting tools-- no need to try to reconcile bank records with order reciepts.
Then you need to double check all the results because LLMs can't be trusted to accurately select retail stores or deductible purchases.
Do I need to? If I moderately underestimate my entertainment spending because my Apple+ subscription got categorized as a grocery purchase, that doesn't seem like a big problem.
If you don't care to that level then why not put your finger in the air and just come up with a made up estimate yourself?
Well that's a different argument, now isn't it?
What time does it save you if you still have to read through just as many entries to validate as you do to sort?
If you're the type who double-checks your work and this is important: 40% of the time.
If you're the type who doesn't: probably 90% of the time.
This feels like goal-post moving now, with questions less genuinely curious about an answer and more trying to "get" me. How am I supposed to answer that, it depends on the task and the model and the harness and specific human being using it.
Use it or don't, I don't care, but at least be genuine in the discussion.
> a lot of AI solutions aren’t easier to do than just doing the thing
Eh, I could see a case where an AI makes ordering for a group easier.
I don't use doordash or buy food like that but I'm definitely using them to find me and buy me clothes that fit me and I want in Vinted and other European marketplaces. To make insurance claims, to check my bank statements, etc.
I would be very surprised if it turns out I'm the only one
In my opinion, I think might have to do more with the dark patterns that are created by these apps. DoorDash, Uber. You place an order and there's all these hidden things that get added in you don't really see. You don't really get to recognize unless you do it manually. It's it's trickery in a way. They they try to gouge and get extra fees and costs in there where you can find ways around it if you're clever and able to do so. So using an agent, that just gives them an advantage because then you end up paying the overinflated price and fees plus tokens on top of everything else. See what people are looking for nowadays is actually ways to lower costs. Inflation is too high, and I think people are starting to realize that. They're trying to find ways and find cheaper ways to do things.
“Get me a burrito. Ok cool are there any other places? Ok but how about ones under 50 minutes delivery? Ok now of those which has higher than 4.5 stars? Alright that one looks good, can I get a large lamb burrito with extra salsa and guac? Ok they don’t do lamb that’s fine, beef is good. They don’t do a large size, that’s alright go with a small. Yes confirm payment.”
Text is just not a good format for ordering things. You want to see pictures and just click on the options you want - we’ve had people paid 300k working on the optimal visual interface for this for probably 30 years, just trying to improve the sale rate 2%.
Agents are good for open ended problems which require stringing together lots of different data sources, which couldn’t be further from ordering food.
> Agents are good for open ended problems which require stringing together lots of different data sources, which couldn’t be further from ordering food.
i feel like you were on the right path but arrived at the wrong conclusion. if you think you're right because the blocking factor is text, you arent paying attention
I don’t think it would be good UX with voice either. An agent could dynamically recreate something resembling the DoorDash UI which probably would work, but would lose out on the familiarity the user has with the actual doordash
> Text is just not a good format for ordering things. You want to see pictures and just click on the options you want
Do you look at pictures and click on things at a restaurant? I suspect you most often read text and talk to people. I think it works just fine.
I think they meant text as in texting/chat interfaces.
I mean a text interface - it’s more like if you went to a restaurant and there was no menu so you had to ask the waiter everything, but he also spoke absolutely no English so you had type out your questions on your phone for him - the latency while the model collates the data is not good
this diva reads the menu at the restaurant like the missal in a church pew, not some ipad kid with sticky fingers
I would not trust the AI to order food off of these websites for me because the labeled data itself is pretty much shit. Lots of dishes are unlabeled, have really bad pictures or no pictures at all, and the worse is the ones that have AI generated descriptions which are often wrong or not helpful. I'm totally fine with letting it just use my saved credit cards and delivery address (I assume the AI doesn't see them) but I can't trust it to order the food I actually want.
E: As an example (n = 1 etc): I am vegetarian. I have never ordered meat dishes, ever. Yet all of these food delivery apps suggest meat dishes for me.
> I assume the AI doesn't see them
Why?
doordash is regularly audited for PCI, they almost certainly store raw CC#s and follow modern tokenization standards. The best the agent would see is the name you stored for the card if you have multiple cards it can pick from in the account.
You can pull the PCI compliance documentation from their trust center if you are a partner https://trust.doordash.com/
For addresses, it's a almost certain the agent would see those since those are visible in the UI when ordering and required for selecting a destination for the order
It's plausible, but also, AI systems have a long history of being plugged in on the wrong side of security boundaries.
Remember when you were able to take over any Instagram account by asking the helpful support AI to send a password reset to an email address of your choice?
>Remember when you were able to take over any Instagram account by asking the helpful support AI to send a password reset to an email address of your choice?
Wow, first I've heard of that. Damages must have been immense for that level of incompetence occasioning financial harm. Or do those laws only apply if you can't hire very expensive lawyers to blame a computer?
There’s a difference between their AI and your AI. For better and worse.
It's better they don't because considering how Claude reacts when you give it a meaningless SSH login password for a local box, the moment it learns your CC# and CVV2 it will probably call your bank and cancel the card instead of ordering any food.
are you saying Claude is not a strict constructionist when it comes to Constitution AI? :)
> AI, I asked you to check the docs for the latest version of the API, yet you didn't. Why?
> You are completely right! That was my miss, I have no excuse. I've now looked at the docs and implemented it.
Now imagine how triggered you'd be when the AI decides to get you a vegan burger because the chicken wrap is on the second page and it know you're a health conscious person.
Remember when Amazon thought that people would say "buy me more paper towels" to their Echo? And of course they didn't because that's insane.
That stopped when Jeff said "Alexa, buy me a newspaper."and Alexa replied "buying the Washington Post."
Jeff: Alexa, buy my whole foods groceries.
Alexa: Okay, buying Whole Foods
Worse than that. Some product manager thought that if they shipped a bunch of buttons that said "Tide" users would keep pressing them and Tide sales would skyrocket. Bet he got promoted for the idea too.
I thought that was an april fools joke at first cause it was first announced on april 1
https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/amazon-launches-dash-button-...
That product actually has legs in business setting if it just dumped it into your orgs purchaser or facilities order sheet for their review first.
Agreed. I can't imagine trusting it enough to make a purchase automatically, and that's before getting to the reality of how awkward it is. Which brand? Which quantity? Which style (extra strong, extra soft, etc)? Did the price go up since last time? All stuff that you can visually spot in a half second, but would be a huge PITA verbally.
That AI is clearly a product imagined by wealthy tech executives who have personal assistants who shop for them, who trust those personal assistants to buy what they expect for them. The use case doesn't resonate for us normal people, because we do our own shopping, are price sensitive, and typically don't just buy things without doing basic research about what they cost.
I'd never made that connection before. This whole category of tech company offerings makes so much more sense now.
Might be a bit reductive, but I think you can probably explain >90% of modern business decisions this way. Being completely out of touch with how a normal person lives seems to have serious impact on just about everything they do.
These people have very different problems than normal people, and they solve them in very different ways. And most of them were born rich, and have always been rich, so they can't even imagine what a normal person's life and needs are. If your target market is also rich executives, then by all means, have your rich executives dream up product features. But now, most of tech are producing solutions for rich tech executives, but hoping that normal people buy them, and they are wondering why normal people don't care.
And it doesn't help that Amazon often doesn't have great pricing on bulky, often fairly low value, consumer staples. (And, in my case, I have a Walmart just down the street so I'm not going to order my Bounty or Charmin from Amazon. The case may be different if you live in a dense city without a car but that's not most people.
Is that true? Amazon reports massive growth in AI and voice commerce. While Echo users appear uncomfortable making big purchases, the segment who routinely use it for stuff like paper towels has been taking off.
I don't know many Echo owners, but the few that I know (n=2) used it to reorder stuff like paper towels.
> There are other signs that voice shopping has never taken off. Fewer than 25% of Amazon Echo owners have ever directly used their devices to make a purchase and fewer than 5% are repeat Alexa shoppers, according to a report last year from Consumer Intelligence Research Partners, which conducts consumer surveys (an Amazon spokesperson said the firm's data was inaccurate and the majority of customers who shop with Alexa are repeat shoppers). And in August 2018, The Information reported that Amazon’s own internal data showed that only 2% of Alexa users had made a purchase so far that year with their voices.
from Amazon Faces Moment of Truth on Alexa as ChatGPT Steals Its Thunder (2023) https://archive.is/2jzve
That's very old data. In 2026 they reported over 100% YoY growth in AI ordering trends. I've seen >500% quoted.
The success of ChatGPT in this space would support the point that AI ordering is a valuable market segment, no?
They are currently showing buy links on Amazon prime in ads they show during their shows after being ad free for years. I can't see anyone being interrupted during their favourite show and then suddenly be interested in buying washing up liquid. Amazon also did those buttons that you clicked to reorder stuff as well.
Ads aren't about making you buy the product immediately. The goal is to make you associate the product category with the product. For example, when you think of washing detergent, which brand do you think of? Of course you think of Tide. Why? Because their advertising works. Which brand makes burgers? McDonald's. What's a refreshing fizzy drink? Coke. This comment is also an advertisement for Tide, McDonald's and Coke because every single time you see them it strengthens your recognition.
? I reorder stuff via my echos all the time. Especially things like toilet paper and paper towels.
Because they dont work. End of the story.
The other day I want to have a 1m cable extension male/female for a XH1.25 It is impossible to find one, because you only find kits to make your own, or a 20 or 30cm one.
I tried with several free LLM, so that they can likely watch much more than I can do and filter all kits, and give the cable I want.
Not a single one was able to provide with a link I could use from my location. They kept suggesting that I shall try these "searches", or products, that were not exactly what I asked.
It is a very simple query, and to be fair, it should be solved at the search box, but it isn't.
The truth is that, if I would let it do it without checking now I would have paid for a kit to make the cable or something else that is not what I want.
Even if they did work how much effort would they really save?
Most of the time speaking or writing out precisely what you want in natural language would be more effort than using the systems we have already developed.
In this case, the problem is at the search bar. Because if there is no cable extension for what I want, the search should show me no items. But that is not good for business, so instead, it shows me crap tangentially related to my search.
None of the IA were useful to work against that anti-user pattern, so at the end I just lost my time, and confidence in assign search task for certain products to IA chats.
Is fast food/delivery food so frequently used that this is now warranted?
Even at my most gluttonous, many years ago, I would order maybe a single takeaway every other week, and when I did that, I'd want to be in complete control to browse and try new things. The only use case I can see for AI is as an alternative to traditional search to work out what some unknown ingredient is, however if I recall, most takeaway apps are just pictures with a name.
People who eat fast food more than once a week need to seriously assess how bad this food is for them. It's overly salted, oily and greasy junk with next to no nutritional value. And for what is it, it is ridiculously expensive. The people that eat it often are stuck in a trap.
For less than half of the cost of the lowest value takeaway (around £20.00, although I've seen people carrying bags with receipts up to £50!), you can buy a whole chicken, potatoes and vegetables, which can cover up to 3 or 4 meals. £10 for 3 meals or £20-50 for 1. You just need to put things in ovens and pots and wait, the same as you have to tap on your phone and wait.
The problem with AI assistants in general is that humans barely ever know what they want and the promise is that AI can intuit/predict what we want. It can't. People like to shop. It's easier to shop with our eyes than our ears. Personal assistants, as far as I can tell, have one use case and that is doing mundane chores like e-mail summaries. But to do that, you have to give them access to everything, so it becomes a transaction of privacy. And I think a lot of people are paranoid. Plus each one is a little token bonfire that is probably costing them money.
And I feel like the labs must all know this, so it makes me wonder why they're actually trying to push these assistants onto us. The answer I'm left with is training data — data theft. They'd all violate their privacy terms if it earned them an extra nickel.
Ya, when it comes to things like food I look at the pictures and my sense of taste, along with my emotional state at that moment. AI isn't a great fit here.
Long-time lurker here. I'm probably something of an anomaly at HN because I don't work in anything remotely related to tech - I'm actually a screenwriter. But I enjoy spending time here because the quality of the discourse reminds me of Reddit back in the day.
I consistently get the feeling that I must have a rather more humanist and enchanted view of the world compared to some of you. I see a lot of hyper-rationalist, data-first discussion of the practical issues connected to AI agents when it comes to ordering takeout, but it seems very clear to me that the main reason no-one wants to use AI for this is because a human being's relationship with food - and sourcing food - is really quite ancient and meaningful. In today's hyper-connected world ordering a burger has become almost comically disconnected from hunting for a wild boar, but they are still the same thing in spirit. And handing that over to an LLM equates to the loss of a significant aspect of the human experience.
I think this applies to a lot of use cases of AI that are doomed to fail - not least anything that seeks to replace a human being's creative potential. Why would anyone want to give that up? It's such an important part of existing.
I think that, as a screenwriter, you're even more disconnected from reality than most IT bros here. Reality is not TV, it's mundane, simple and boring. Sometimes people just want to eat something and be done with it as fast as possible.
> DoorDash only rolled out its Model Context Protocol (MCP) connector less than a month ago. ... Without that kind of linkup—which is still only available to a small number of “early beta partners” and mainly used to streamline corporate lunch orders
So it's available to almost no one anyway. Misleading title.
The article does say that AI agents could go through the web interface, but it's not clear if Doordash is counting those orders as AI orders or not. I agree, there's no real information here.
Have you considered people may not actually want this?
What point are you making?
I use AI like a mad man to find what I need on Amazon or other websites.
For example, got a new washing machine, had to find adapters, it is so easy to have it find it for me, and then show me a few options. And understand what I need.
Just had it search for bubble wrap and break down what is most cost effective and gets it to me in 2 to 3 days. So easy, and got me off Amazon.
Food? No way, Food is a pleasure if I am ordering it and a splurge. I don't need a machine to help me pick out what taste good. Maybe translate some things if I'm struggling in that language.
A chef drives over and makes a homemade meal. Healthy eating could be insurance-subsidized.
You can likely increase healthy eating if you tax food and 100% of taxes go toward subsidizing veggies (frozen and fresh), beans, and real food.
Ordering off DoorDash seems to me like the worst possible case for agents (or Alexa voice speakers before them.)
I need to see the full menu, with prices and picture of the food and options. Having an agent in the middle is just going to slow me down.
I suppose there is levels to all of these things. For somebody who uses apps to obtain most of their food, this is probably the next step.
Ordering off of DoorDash (or whatever equivalent app elsewhere) in general seems to be the worst possible way to acquire and eat food, in my personal opinion.
Everything on these apps is nutrition-zero junk, filled with salt, oil and sugar, charged at a premium. I ate it in the past, and nowadays I couldn't be paid to eat it. Self-cooked meals beat them in every way, including convenience.
I think the proposition only works if you consistently order the same items from the same restaurant (and so on). It makes the order more predictable ("hey siri, order the same takeout I got from X chinese spot last week").
I don't need to see a menu, prices, or options for that unless I want to deviate from it.
Then you don't need an agent. You just need a classic automation.
Sure, if the audience is all developers. We're talking about people who very likely are not.
The food delivery app I use occasionally has a reorder button for past orders. I've never used it but I can't imagine it's more of a hassle than typing something to a hallucinating chatbot
Many points were raised, but I believe that key term for what people do when preparing fo buying decison is they prepare "overview" of situation. Price spectrum, sizes, wanted/liked/unlocked ingredients any parameters.
You can't make proper overview without actually browsing menu of one or two providers. AI at best can sloppify you with wall of text or table that you actually don't want to read, because menus and UI are actually better design than random markdown output.
Then AIncsn have tool to output good summary of menu, but people will not trust that this choice was in their interest rather than minmaxing algo of whoever controls agent.
Recently I needed to book a table for 16 for a rehearsal dinner. I used ChatGPT work to find availabilities and create an html doc of only restaurants that could handle our party size, with pictures, menu comparisons, locations, and approximate prices. It knocked the task out of the park and I went with one of the recommended restaurants.
That said, the last mile, the bit where I paid, I called the kitchen manager and talked to them. Even if I trusted ChatGPT with this part, I like building a rapport with who’s serving me and my family food, and it’s a special occasion so I know they want to nail the experience. ChatGPT saved me so many hours of work and research and replaced Google, yelp, and so many other random services.
I don’t think agents are going to work with DoorDash they’re going to replace DoorDash - taking their core competency of helping me discover and choose what’s new and interesting to me, what restaurant is open and meets my criteria and let me stay connected with the people rather than building a wall between me and them
For me, the best use of AI is making bespoke software connecting systems and devices that have no business being connected but I find value in so I can have a unique interface for all my tech and hobbies. Not sure how that gets translated to the everyday man but it sure isn't "bring me food".
Agents are great for that middle ground between just doing it manually and creating an automation to do it. Which strikes me as yet another reason AI is so well suited to software development tasks, but hard to find useful applications outside of software development.
Agreed, if anything I could see making a one click button to complete order and checkout of say my normal pizza order. Doesn't need AI to operate.
I think eventually demand for this is gonna pick up. I order the same thing every single time(though on a local alternative & not doordash) and I totally wish I could have an agent drive that. At my lunch time ask me if it can order the usual, I say yes it places the order, monitors it - essentially make sure I get my lunch brought to me without - the cognitive overload from interacting with these food delivery apps or in some cases speaking with the delivery people. Yeah - chat might not be the right interface for that there's the MCP and I think more people if they knoew how powerful that was would be excited about the possibilities of building custom workflows
Could that not just be served by a "save favourite order" button...
That means the user/customer has to wait until the restaurant/delivery app adds this functionality. Or they could use their agent today to get the same functionality.
> I think more people if they knoew how powerful that was would be excited about the possibilities of building custom workflows
You think "repeat my last order" is a cognitive burden?
Except with most non-AI delivery apps, there’s no straightforward way to just say “repeat my last order” and have it delivered to me. And that’s kind of my point. I don’t want to have to open the app, place the order, track the delivery, or deal with the delivery person. I just want my lunch to show up at the usual time without having to think about any of that.
What interaction is the AI performing to "make sure you get it"? Does it call the driver every 30 seconds for a status update?
Well, it could chat with the driver. Where I live the norm is when a driver is assigned your order they get to text you to confirm your location is correct(annoying, I know), they text you again if they are somehow finding it hard to get to your location, they text when they get to your gate for an access code, they text when they get to the front of your house. Thats a lot of texting I'lld gladly let an agent do for me.
I actually do it twice every day. I gave it my preference and time. Occasionally I steer it to order “something with fish” or “big portion because im hungry”
When I have demoed the use of agents, I usually do it with an agent combining multiple applications' results. Something like: "We're having a family gathering at grandma's. Which of us can stop in at the drugstore to pick up her prescriptions on the way without adding a lot to our travel time?"
Agents are great at moderately complex combinations of data and apps. If I had to do this every day or every week even, it might be worth creating a script suited for a task like that using some automation system. Agents are great at providing a disposable saw when it doesn't make sense to stop and sharpen the saw.
I'm not a doorDash user, but they've been doing it long enough to have an app that's probably highly polished. There's not going to be a lot of upside to speaking or typing an English language command to get what you want. Trying to do that is a waste of a well designed app and the agent's token budget.
I would be extremely cross if I heard that someone gave my location information to some company that runs this stuff. That level of privacy violation should lead to disinheritance.
Well, let me tell you that you should be extremely cross. Unless nobody knows your address or you’ve signed up for any services, these companies already have your information.
What do you use for a contact list?
The example you listed can be solved with a map lookup, a paper map even.
Maybe I am confused but what does the AI do in your example? Isn't that just an instance of Google Maps itself being useful? What does the agent even spend its time doing?
Just because text isn't the best interface for agentic commerce doesn't mean agentic commerce is dead. The way I'm building my open-source marketplace[0], each store's storefront and cart are rendered right in the chat through MCP UI. So you can ask the agent to change something in your cart or add something, but you also have a real cart in the UI that you can tap and edit directly.
0. https://github.com/openshiporg/marketplace
Similar concept as with shopping, where the selling point is "your agent will do all your shopping for you"
But the wide consensus from most of the industry (including AI people) is that agent shopping is useful for stuff you don't like to shop for (like groceries, computer parts, ad-hoc supplies like paper towels)
But for clothes, and interesting things, where the experience is akin to window shopping, scrolling and imagining what you look like in a particular shirt is actually an integral part of the experience.
Guessing that doordash/ubereats has a part of that appeal, where you get to imagine/visualize the food before you order it.
You would imagine maybe personal agents like instinct would drive up this usage. But why order food through 5 text messages when you could do it in five taps?
I work for a payment processor and there's been talk from the bigwigs about making the platform "Ready for agentic commerce".
I have never seen so little enthusiasm for a project before in my entire professional life, and I've worked on some real dud projects. Literally nobody cares to even pretend they think this crap is useful, any discussion I've ever heard on the topic is people memeing on it. As far as I can tell not even the execs talking about it give a shit, which to me shows how utterly useless the whole agentic commerce crap is
This has always been an ai use case that made no sense to me. The UI for ordering food is good, it's visual, it shows you the food you're getting and how much it costs. There's no reason for a chat interface to be an upgrade here. Chat interfaces only have an advantage when you need the nuance of language. It's good at the things where trying to build a UI for it would collapse into an incoherent jumble of visual language.
It's like Netflix- scrolling around looking at previews gives you all the dopamine, by the time you select a movie your brain just craves the phone and it's just background. You don't get doordash because you want to order a good, balanced, healthy meal. You do it because you want to scroll and find something that makes your brain tingle. By the time the food shows up cold 45min later, you're already on to the next thing.
Some of these use case feel so imaginary that lot of people just don't get why would some other people do them. Like with food delivery I want to select specifically what I want and evaluate if the price is right. Same goes for ordering most stuff or deciding on vacation.
Maybe I could get train ticket from AI... Or order taxi. At least until it went wrong for the first time...
"I want to order food from this restaurant"
"Sure, here's 10 options for different food from this restaurant that you totally couldn't have found just by searching for their website instead of writing this prompt!"
Maybe people enjoy ordering food themselves?
There are many things that agents can do that I would rather do myself.
I do run agents like Meta Muse and Google Spark just to experiment with them, but those are just short experiences.
How about this:
Maybe people enjoy writing assembly themselves?
There are many things that compilers can do that I would rather do myself.
I do run compilers like C and FORTRAN just to experiment with them, but those are just short experiences.
I use AI to shop all the time. I make it find the cheapest option.
I also use it to book ubers and uber eats but I check the result first.
I don't understand this logic.
It's going to take time, but it'll happen.
Bots and tech are testing humanity's levels of desire for laziness and how much they are ready to pay for buying that laziness. Turns out that the desire is limitless. As someone said, the ultimate luxury is in having maximum laziness - not having to move, talk, think or use senses - the state of being a rock.
I mean even if I were an AI maximalist and very lazy, I think clicking “reorder” in the DoorDash app is infinitely easier than trying to tell Muse or whatever to order me me last DoorDash meal.
help i'm a rock
Zappa was right. Zappa forever.
My hot take is capitalism can't deliver a "order one pepperoni pizza" product.
This is literally Pizza Hut flow right now: - Go to website, look for deals page where pizza is $10 instead of $20. - Click order, upsell on breadsticks, etc, etc. - Check out, fees, delivery charge, tip take price from $10 to $20. - On the receipt page, get SiriusXM offers.
Sellers are just too incentivized to upsell, and over-charge the less transparency there is.
Same for recipes/shopping carts. Can't trust sellers to optimize for minimum price/maximum value.
"you deserve a treat after $event, so I added cheesy garlic bread, Coca Cola, and a new Hershey's Overload dessert -- to undo these changes write a letter to me on a typewriter using headed 160gsm paper"
I would use it if they let me, but you have to be approved for access to their cli and mcp is only for companies. I've had my agent place orders but clicking around with computer use takes longer than ordering by hand.
Not surprising in hindsight.
It's not a super repetitive problem (e.g.respond to 100s of messages) and human judgment is highly valued here (what am I hungry for?) and visuals are sometimes a factor.
Agents are good for complex purchases with lots of hidden fees like hotels. Less useful for burgers, though I'd definitely try it for a large catering order.
This is kind of a moot article because up until a month a go when DoorDash released their MCP, their bot detection was getting in the way of agentic ordering.
I know people that have been automating their Doordash orders even before modern AI was a thing. When done right the server cannot tell.
IQ level of clients may have something to do with it.
I built https://bit.recipes to facilitate my agent ordering my groceries (saves ~60 mins of family annoyance a week). it’s really meant to apply more rails and human/family collaboration, rather than a pure AI play or anything
Because the DoorDash app is so simple, delightful, intuitive?
Look, there's a lot of AI excitement and a lot of it is dumb. But if there's a number I can text "hey get me a pizza" and it re-orders the same pizza order I make every Friday night, I'm going to use it. Would I pay for it? As a standalone service? Obviously not.
But if I could delete half the apps on my phone with their horrid dark-pattern-filled interfaces and constant upsells, I'd love that. I'll happily delegate the interfacing to an agent.
And I'd 100% pay that agent to drop the ads and upsells when DoorDash tells it to pass them along.
Not to mention, searching for food joints is awful. If I want to find authentic Chinese or somewhere with real Bao, I'm going to have to trudge through a hundred pages of Google, Reddit, Yelp, online menus. 90% of the results are garbage and sponsored fast food slop or shadow kitchens.
If I could just ask a single sentence and get back pre-filtered, high-quality answers I would be stoked.
DoorDash seems like a resource anti-optimization that would be made irrelevant by an AI agent managing one's meals. An unofficial HEB MCP [0]—that's cooking with gas!
0. https://github.com/mgwalkerjr95/texas-grocery-mcp
* No affiliation with the above repo, but I'm considering trying it out.
This is not a model-agnostic solution.
2026, re-inventing APIs with 3 levels more indirection \_(ツ)_/ and calling it "innovative"
its not hard to order food without AI
its not hard to prepare food without AI
its not hard to "do X without AI" for about 99.99999% of all different possible cases of X
Give a random chatbot pushed by fomo idiots access to all your personal data and the ability to spend your fucking money? you deserve what you get if you're dumb enough to do that.
Why are people even using doordash in 2026? It is pretty much the embodiment of capitalism ruining everything except the shareholder's wallets
Another way to say it might be - the current version or approach of AI Agents don't do much for users in that use case.
While I'm sure there is a place for AI on the food prep side of things, I think it misses the point on the ordering side. While a lot of people want something different, they don't want it to be that different and it's just easier and faster to choose it themselves.