One sad part of the GenAI wave happening right now is that we're past the golden age of open APIs. It's hard to read data with widespread anti-abuse checks (CA

One sad part of the GenAI wave happening right now is that we're past the golden age of open APIs. It's hard to read data with widespread anti-abuse checks (CAPTCHAs), lack of open-format data (RSS support being spotty), and restricted APIs (ex: Twitter API). Companies have all the incentives to prevent bot use, and select for human eyeballs. If we had a Yahoo Pipes sort of golden age, GenAI agents would have a vaster playground to play in, and would be more useful for us. Consider building an agent for choosing what to do on weekends for a group of friends. The agent would need to keep state for past activities (X, Y, and Z went upstate to Storm King last week) and users' preferences (ex: liking dosas or Calder, dietary restrictions). This part is easy enough - you could just keep a notebook that's passed as context. Older context gets simply deleted or condensed into high level points. But would it be easy for the agent to: 1) Look up nearby restaurants and events? (Perhaps Resy/OpenTable allow listing restaurants, but it's likely they have tons of anti-abuse tech. Is there even a place where you could see a list of public events - Google pays a third-party for this feed.) 2) Actuate on behalf of the user? (Do Resy and OpenTable allow authority delegation so the agent could book restaurants for users? There's no standard way to do this across venue types - concerts, museums, cooking classes. Is it realistic for agents to click through these sites on their own?)