An AI agent will likely be worse in that you would have to actively haggle with it so it doesn’t upsell you by default, which IMO is harder than circumnavigatin

An AI agent will likely be worse in that you would have to actively haggle with it so it doesn’t upsell you by default, which IMO is harder than circumnavigating the dark patterns. An actually useful agent is something that is totally doable with technologies even from a decade ago, which you by necessity need to host yourself, with a sizeable amount of DIY and duct tape, since it won’t be allowed to exist as a hosted product. The purveyor of goods and services cannot bargain with it so it puts useless junk into your shopping cart on impulse. You cannot really upsell it, all the ad impressions are lost on it, and you cannot phish it with ad buttons that look like the UI of your site — it goes in with the sole purpose to make your bookings/arrangements, it’s a quick in-and-out. It, by its very definition and design, is very adversarial to how most companies with Internet presences run things.