8 ms·

Responding to the tweet quoted in the article: why are the examples given of futuristic capabilities always so visionless - it's always booking a flight or sche

by Oarch 7mo ago

Responding to the tweet quoted in the article: why are the examples given of futuristic capabilities always so visionless - it's always booking a flight or scheduling a meeting. Doing this manually is already pretty trivial, it's more productivity theatre than genuinely life-changing. There are real, impressive examples of the power of agentic flows out there. Can we up the quality of our examples just a bit?

AlienRobot 7mo ago
For example?
- Oarch 7mo ago
  It would probably depend on the target audience. I was very impressed by Anthropic's swarm of agents building a C compiler earlier this year with 1000 PRs per hour. Easy to nitpick that it wasn't perfect, but it sure was impressive.
  - refulgentis 7mo ago
    Right. Pretty impressive. What percentage of people will think that’s life changing? Because then we’re not talking about “can everyone up their demos to life changing, please?”, we’re talking about “can everyone use demos Oarch thinks are life changing, please?” - and “can build a MVP C compiler draft that barely works for $XXK” isn’t really that compelling to me, and we’re both software engineers, and my whole day job has been an agentic coder for…2.5 years?…now. My incentive structure and demographics are lined up perfectly to agree with you, but I don’t :/
    - Oarch 7mo ago
      I'm still sure we can do a little better though. Maybe a personalised diet and exercise plan based on a huge range of information: preferences, biometrics, habit forming, disposable income, your local area etc
      - refulgentis 7mo ago
        This is an excellent point and reminds me that, in some ways, the agentic coding stuff and ability for RL to hill climb on that and improve models quickly, has distracted from prompt engineering / putting more effort into getting data to them as a user.
      - greedo 7mo ago
        Like putting glue on your pizza?
  - AlienRobot 7mo ago
    How many C compilers do we need...
    - deleted 7mo ago
      [deleted]
  - pron 7mo ago
    You mean trying and failing to build a C compiler. This isn't a very hard task to begin with (assuming you know compilers, and the models do), but it was made unrealistically easy by giving the agents thousands of tests written by humans over years (on top of a spec and a reference implementation, both of which the models were trained on), and the agents still failed to converge. I was actually surprised that they failed as this was the purest possible example of "just do the coding" (something that isn't achievable in real or more complex cases) and when I read the description I thought they made it too easy, and in a way that isn't representative of real software. My thought at that failure was that if agents can't even build a C compiler with so much preparation effort put into the test, then we have some ways to go. Indeed, once you work a lot with agents for a while you see that coding isn't really their strong suit (although they are impressive at debugging).
  - queenkjuul 7mo ago
    You're too easily impressed
refulgentis 7mo ago
> Can we up the quality of our examples just a bit? No. And there’s mundane answers why. People used to talk about phone home screens, back in the day, every iPhone had 16 spots It became wisdom everyone had the same 12 apps but then there were 4 that that were core for you and where most of your use went, but they were different apps from everyone else. So it goes for agent demos. Another reason: every agentic flow is a series of mundane steps that can be rounded to mundane and easy to do yourself. Value depends on how often you have to repeat them. If I have to book a flight once every year, I don’t need it and it’s mundane. There’s no life changing demo out there that someone won’t reply dismissively to. If there was, you’d see them somewhere, no? It’s been years of LLMs now. Put most bluntly: when faced with a contradiction, first, check your premises. The contradiction here being, everyone else doesn’t understand their agent demos are boring and if just one person finally put a little work and imagination into it, they’d be life changing.
- otabdeveloper4 7mo ago
  There are easy no-brainer productivity boosts with LLMs. For example, automatically sorting your email by topic. Nobody shows this because the technology is still immature and very shit.
  - driftnode 7mo ago
    honestly sorting email is the one thing that should have been solved five years ago. the tech is fine for classification. the problem is nobody wants to build a boring email sorter when you can announce an autonomous life assistant
usui 7mo ago
Have you seen how bad flight booking sites can get? I've had to download airline apps a majority of the time because the website failed to finish payment properly. I don't think we should call presentations visionless or fault them for wanting to solve this UX nightmare.
- dawnerd 7mo ago
  And this sounds like something you absolutely wouldn’t want an ai agent trying to figure out.
- amanzi 7mo ago
  And you want to add an unreliable, non-deterministic LLM into the flow too?
- thinkingtoilet 7mo ago
  That is never happened to me once.
  - refulgentis 7mo ago
    [flagged]
- gum_wobble 7mo ago
  So the solution to bad design and enshittification is to have an horde of agents to throw at tasks now?
- ceejayoz 7mo ago
  > Have you seen how bad flight booking sites can get? Claude is pretty amazing, but it still goes down rabbit holes and makes obvious mistakes. Combining that with "oops I just bought a non-refundable flight to the wrong city" seems... unfun.
ForHackernews 7mo ago
The dream of the middle class IT drone is to become the executive Office Man: he shouts at his PA and she books his flights. Now AI can provide a simulacrum of his fondest aspiration, to be too important to click through booking.com and make someone else do it for him.
- bitwize 7mo ago
  Been a middle-class IT drone much of my adult life. This is not my dream. In fact I just realized that one reason I don't like AI dev tools is because they turn me into the kind of dickhead manager I despise: one who doesn't understand the code or the nature of the work involved, just gives orders on what needs to be built and complains when it doesn't work.
  - never_inline 7mo ago
    I fix it by micromanaging it. Which class, method, function, module - I dictate the low level structure and features. I dump my all my hard earned coding opinions in a profoundly crafted markdown file.
    - bitwize 7mo ago
      What helps me adjust is what I call Thanos-coding: trying to get AI to do the thing with contexts and agents and SDD and whateverthefuck, and if it gets tangled on its own shoelace say "Fine. I'll do it myself." Alternatively: making its mistakes disappear with a snap of my fingers and starting over.
- kbenson 7mo ago
  Well, I've taken to describing the best responsible use of AI to help your work as though you have an executive assistant, so I can see why people would come to that conclusion. I don't tend to think of booking flights for that though, I tend to think of asking them to gather information and present it to me so I can review it for whether it's appropriate to include, probably with changes, in whatever I'm working on. Perhaps an executive assistant isn't the right term for that, or perhaps it's just that different people and different industries have vastly different ideas of how to make use of an executive assistant. I don't know enough to answer that.
sdoering 7mo ago
Not using OpenClaw - but I have a limited agent running that currently does a few things well. Morning Briefing: - it reads all my new email (multiple accounts and contexts), calendars (same accounts and contexts), slack (and other chat) messages (multiple slacks, matrix, discord, and so on), the weather reports, my open/closed recent to dos in a shared list across all my devices, my latest journal/log entries of things done. Has access for cross referencing to my "people files" to get context on mails/appointments and chat messages. From all this, as well as my RSS feeds, it generates a comprehensive yet short-ish morning briefing I receive on weekdays at 7am. Two minutes and I have a good grasp of my day, important meetings/deadlines/to dos, possible scheduling conflicts across the multiple calendars (that are not syncable due to corporate policies). This is a very high level overview that already enables me to plan my day better, reschedule things if necessary. And start the day focused on my most important open tasks/topics. More often than not this enables me to keep the laptop closed and do the conceptual work first without getting sucked into email. Or teams. By the way: Sadly teams is not accessible to it right now. MS Power Automate sadly does not enable forwarding the content of chats. Unlike with emails or calendar appointments. Just for that alone it is worth having it to me. YMMV. I also can fire a research request via chat. It does that and writes the results into a file that gets synced to my other devices. Meaning I have it available at any device within a minute or so. Really handy sometimes. It also runs a few regular research tasks on a schedule. And a bit of prep work for copy writing and stuff like this. Currently it is just a hobby/play project. But the morning briefing to me is easily worth an hour of my day. Totally worth running it on my infra without additional costs.
- aftbit 7mo ago
  >possible scheduling conflicts across the multiple calendars (that are not syncable due to corporate policies) Doesn't this sorta defeat those policies though? Now all of your calendars are "synced" to a random unvalidated AI agent.
  - localuser13 7mo ago
    Unless this whole setup is self-hosted (which I doubt), it's also uploaded to some data lake of a company which is in business of profiting from information. Intelligence agencies are really heading into a golden age, with everyone syncing all the data they have to the cloud, in plaintext. I mean it was already bad, but it's somehow getting worse.
bluGill 7mo ago
They are only trivial in the simple case. When you need a bunch of busy people in a meeting it becomes hard to book a meeting. If several people need to travel incuding get a visa it is hard to fit it all it between other meetings that refuired people caanot skip. travel is hard when you are trying for the best deal across flights, hotels and such. many sites only guarentee prices for 15 minutes so you can't even get all the needed prices on a spreadsheet at once - particularly if you have flevible travel dates. I've booked a best price plane ticket only to discover it was the worst date for hotels and I could have saved money on a more expensive flight.
mjr00 7mo ago
> why are the examples given of futuristic capabilities always so visionless - it's always booking a flight or scheduling a meeting. This AI wave is filled with "ideas guys/gals" who thought they had an amazing awesome idea and if only they knew how to program they could make a best-selling billion dollar idea, being confronted with the reality that their ideas are really uninteresting as well. They're still happy to write blog posts about how their bleeding-edge Claw setup sends them a push notification whenever someone comments on one of their LinkedIn posts, though.
- stbtrax 7mo ago
  the whole obsequious nature of how LLMs also amp them up thinking they're onto something incredible is throwing gas on this dumpster fire. "What a great idea! This will revolutionize linkedin commenting. Let's implement it together."
  - johnisgood 7mo ago
    Oh for sure. When I present something to the LLM it always tells me how great it is until I make it "question" it, then it says it was overestimating this or that. Eh. Quite annoying.
    - Jimmc414 7mo ago
      https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/s/qfBsFB2IzU https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/s/qfBsFB2IzU
      - deleted 7mo ago
        [deleted]
    - salawat 7mo ago
      You have to remember that LLM's don't have any persistent capacity to hold a "judgement". You ask for something, it provides an attempt at a completion for it. No fact checking, no reasoning, just a plausible looking output, tuned to hopefully get you to repeat the interaction. Half the reason the dominant UX is a "Chat" is that's the only way to provide a facsimile of memory or persistence across requests. Append the last few turns, press go. Over time you can develop an eye for the model's tics/attractor topics. Remember that they bill by token use, and suddenly, the entire UX/architecture starts making sense.
Barrin92 7mo ago
>There are real, impressive examples of the power of agentic flows there aren't, and just like the blockchain "industry" with its "surely this is going to be the killer app" we're going to be in this circus until the money dries up. Just like the note-taking craze, the crypto ecosystem and now AI there's an almost inverse relation between the people advocating it and actually doing any meaningful work. The more anyone's pushing it the faster you should run into the opposite direction.
- aftbit 7mo ago
  I'm gonna keep saying this forever - there are two obvious "killer apps" for crypto: 1. Semi-private blockchains, where you can rely on an actor not to be actively malicious, but still want to be able to cryptographically hold them to a past statement (think banks settling up with each other) 2. NFTs for tracking physical products through a logistics supply chain. Every time a container moves from one node to the next in a physical logistics chain (which includes tons of low trust "last mile" carriers), its corresponding NFT changes ownership as well. This could become as granular as there's money to support. These would both provide material advantages above and beyond a centralized SQL database as there's no obvious central party that is trusted enough to operate that database. Neither has anything to do with retail investors or JPEGs though, so they'll never moon and you'll never hear about them.
  - mjr00 7mo ago
    AFAIK both of these use cases had many millions of invested dollars dumped into them during the Blockchain hype and neither resulted in anything. It might not be an exact match for (1), but there was famously the ASX blockchain project[0] which turned out to be a total failure. For (2), IBM made "Farmer Connect"[1], which is now almost entirely scrubbed from their website, which promised to do supply chain logistics on a blockchain. [0] https://www.reuters.com/markets/australian-stock-exchanges-blockchain-failure-burns-market-trust-2022-12-20/ https://www.reuters.com/markets/australian-stock-exchanges-b... [1] https://mediacenter.ibm.com/media/Farmer+Connect+%2B+IBM/1_8nksvgym https://mediacenter.ibm.com/media/Farmer+Connect+%2B+IBM/1_8...
sxg 7mo ago
Some of it is lack of imagination, but some of it is because many truly visionary examples would largely sound stupid to most of today's audience. Imagine it's 2007 and you're explaining how the smartphone will change society over the next 20 years: - A photo sharing app will change restaurants, public spaces, and the entire travel industry across the world - The smartphone will bring about regime change in Egypt, Tunisia, Lebanon, and other countries in ~4 years - We'll replace taxis and hotels by getting rides and sharing homes with strangers - Billions of people across the world will never need to own a desktop or laptop - A short video sharing app will kill TV - QR codes become relevant Most of these would be a hard sell at the time.
- namibj 7mo ago
  Instagram Arabian spring Uber Airbnb Cloud-ification/shift to web apps and mobile-first ....tiktok? Or is YouTube considered "short video sharing app"? Because I see no evidence tiktok in particular killing TV... To be fair, QR code did hit print magazines/newspapers in Germany (just as an example; English wiki was not elaborating on initial history of public use/perception) in late 2007, so that one wasn't nearly as far-fetched.
  - butlike 7mo ago
    Not only is TV alive and well, we're even getting channels back with the content splintered across multiple streaming platforms.
- runarberg 7mo ago
  None of these actually were hard to sell. In 2007 we had mobile phones, we had mp3 players (the iPod was actually very good), we had CouchSurfing, etc. I think the smart phone revolution is actually pretty overstated. It basically only made computers cheaper and handier to carry (but also more walled gardens). There are a few capabilities of smart phones we do today which we didn’t with do with computers and mobile phones back in 2007, such as navigation (GPS were a thing but not used much by the general public). Your case would be much stronger if you’d use the World Wide Web as your analogy, as in 1995 it would by hard to convince anybody how important it would be to maintain a web presence. And nobody would guess a social media like the irc would blow up into something other then a toy. However I think the analogy with smartphones are actually more apt, this AI revolution has made statistical models more accessible, but we are only using them for things we were already capable of before, and unlike the web, and much like smartphones, I don’t think that will actually change. But unlike smartphones, it will always be cheaper and often even easier to use the alternatives.
sylos 7mo ago
I think some folks want a legitmate personal assistant/secretary like ceo's and wealthy people have but ai. I think that's a good goal. Modern cells and pdas kinda fell short of "your own literal secretary" and I think people want that. Still we should continue pushing the boundaries beyond that.
- the_snooze 7mo ago
  The purpose of a personal assistant isn’t to fit people into your calendar. It’s to filter them out. They serve as a barrier to your time, not an enabler for other people to claim it. I don’t see how an AI can meaningfully accomplish that any better than simply just making yourself more difficult to reach.
  - blackcatsec 7mo ago
    This is it right here. I've long thought about this one and whether I should bother with an AI agent that can do all of this stuff for me, but the reality is both what you said and I'm not rich enough. Do I want the AI Agent to take my bank account and automatically pay some bill every month in full? What if you go a little over that month due to an emergency expense you weren't prepared for? And it's not a matter of "I don't have enough in my bank account for this one time charge", but it's "I don't have enough in my bank account for this charge and 3 others coming at the end of the month." type deal. Agents aren't going to be very good at that. "Hey I paid $3,000 on your credit card in order to prevent you from incurring interest. Interest is really bad to carry on a credit card and you should minimize that as much as possible." Me: "Yeah but I needed that money for rent this month." Agent: "Oh, yeah! I should have taken that into account! It looks like we can't reverse the charge for the payment." Yeah, no fucking thank you LOL.
    - mrguyorama 7mo ago
      >Do I want the AI Agent to take my bank account and automatically pay some bill every month in full? Also this supposed use case is called "Autopay" and requires zero AI. A lot of people still don't use it. Even when it includes a discount!
endofreach 7mo ago
> There are real, impressive examples of the power of agentic flows out there. Can we up the quality of our examples just a bit? Please don't. The reason we're still enjoying the bit of the old world as we know it, is just because nobody has really figured it out yet. Enjoy the moment, while it lasts.
- enraged_camel 7mo ago
  What does this even mean? By definition, we have been enjoying "the moment" for quite a while now. What is so special about it that we should work to prolong it, and to avoid moving forward?
prmoustache 7mo ago
[dead]
ljm 7mo ago
The real impressive examples get turned into SaaS prototypes and not placeholders for your imagination. If they had vision they wouldn't be thrown out in a blog post.
- timacles 7mo ago
  This is the tech equivalent of my girlfriend goes to another school. If someone implemented something impressive with this stuff, they wouldnt be keeping it quiet. False negatives are unproductive
brotchie 7mo ago
OpenClaw is just like any other tool, you need to learn it before its power is available to you. Just like anything in engineering really: you have to play around source control to understand source control, you have to play around with database indexes to learn how to optimize a database. Once you've learned it and incorporated it into your tool set, you then have that to wield in solving problems "oh, damn, a database index is perfect for this." To this end, folks doing flights and scheduling meetings using OpenClaw are really in that exploration / learning phase. They tackle the first (possibly uninventive thing) that comes to mind to just dive in and learn. The real wins come down the line when you're tackling some business / personal life problem and go: "wait a second, an OpenClaw agent would be perfect for this!"
- imiric 7mo ago
  > OpenClaw is just like any other tool, you need to learn it before its power is available to you. That's ridiculous. The utility of any tool is usually knowable before using it. That's how most tools work. I don't need to learn how to drive a car to know what I could use it for. I learn to drive it because I want to benefit from it, not the other way around. It's the same with computers and any program. I use it to accomplish a specific task, not to discover the tasks it could be useful for. OpenClaw is yet another tool in search of a problem, like most of the "AI" ecosystem. When the bubble bursts, nobody will remember these tools, and we'll be able to focus on technology that solves problems people actually have.
  - wyre 7mo ago
    Such a wrong take. The utility of a program like Excel, Obsidian, Notion, Unity, Jupyter, or Emacs far beyond the knowledge of knowing how to use the product. All of these products are hammers with nails as far as your creativity will take you. Its wild to have be on a website called Hacker News, talking about a product that can make a computer do seemingly anything, and insisting its a tool in search of a problem.
    - deleted 7mo ago
      [deleted]
lxgr 7mo ago
That's a fair point, and I guess the marketing problem here is intrinsic: If the problem is trivial, off-the-shelf solutions abound; if it's idiosyncratic, almost nobody will be able to relate (as you can't assume that people will do the transfer of "if it can solve complex problem I don't understand A, it'll probably be able to solve my complex problem B" for promotional material).
davidw 7mo ago
Booking a flight is the kind of thing I want to dedicate my full attention to. It's expensive, and the timing and details matter a lot. I'm happy for the voice assistant to add stuff to my grocery list, though. The consequences are not serious if it screws up a letter or something.
- etiam 7mo ago
  Booking a flight is the kind of thing I'd really want to avoid doing myself nowadays if possible though. Surveying the offers is usually such a snake pit of deceptive marketing and incomplete service conditions that I feel somewhat nauseous just at the prospect of having to look at it. I wouldn't remotely trust a software assistant to deal with all that misdirection autonomously, but I guess I'd be prepared to give it a chance collating options with tolerable time and cost, attempting to make the price include the stuff that has to be added to preserve health, sanity and a modicum of human dignity.
  - davidw 7mo ago
    Asking it to find the best deal? Sure, I could totally see that. But I want to double check that myself and actually buy it in order to make sure my flight to Denver from Portland doesn't have a layover in Anchorage or something.
  - joquarky 7mo ago
    Nearly everything targeting consumers is a snake pit now. Everything has one or more upsells. Dark patterns are now nominal practice. Quality has gone to shit.
- Ferret7446 7mo ago
  We will get to the point where you'll trust it to catch those issues. The latest models can already do it sometimes for code, like explain that it considered various options and the tradeoffs between them.
- ericd 7mo ago
  Apparently I'm the only one here who finds it to be one of the worst things I ever have to do, I hate managing the combinatorial tab explosion by hand. Compounded by the adversarial nature of the price-setting algorithms that jack up the price on you if you show too much interest by researching too intensively. Just booked a flight for our family in two parts, and booking for one set of us made the price for the second set of us with a slightly different itinerary massively more expensive, because it was "in demand". Can't wait for agents to handle all of it.
zihotki 7mo ago
I also have the same concerns. I have my agenda meeting free and create meetings like once a few weeks. The same is for booking flight tickets - once a decade. Adding openclaw there would take more time and effort than doing it manually. And none of the friends playing with openclaw have any useful non-trivial workflows which can't be automated in oldschool way. The only viable workflow so far I could think of - build your own knowledge base and info processing pipeline.
Waterluvian 7mo ago
[dead]
gherkinnn 7mo ago
It's either vague notions like "more important than the invention fire", or concrete cases like booking trips that the likes of Google can enshittify at lightspeed. I am not optimistic, not because the techs is lacking, but the context in which it is born is awful.
tyingq 7mo ago
> Doing this manually is already pretty trivial Well, and doing them programmatically and automatically without any AI is also possible, if not trivial...and has been for some time.
mandeepj 7mo ago
> booking a flight > Doing this manually is already pretty trivial No, it’s not! You are the one who made it trivial by using three words to define! How about if I could only fly out between 9 am-noon next Friday? Also, combine it with hotel and rental car. Many times total $ between sites could be a difference of close to $200 or more along with better itinerary. That’s just the surface. The more preferences you add, the complex it becomes, so make it a right scenario for agent automation along with calendar management which has similar complexity.
- procone 7mo ago
  Still sounds trivial. Not sure why you're trying to make travel sound like a complex problem that can only be solved by burning tokens.
- tacticus 7mo ago
  get a travel agent? Probably more reliable and corp ones exist.
  - mandeepj 7mo ago
    > get a travel agent? I think: to Uber founder, you’d have said get a driver or yellow cab :-) To TurboTax founder, you’d have said get a tax accountant :-)
mickdarling 7mo ago
I don't use Claw. It is way too dangerous. I built my own system where I know the ins and outs and how they can break. When it comes to agents' tasks, I tend to focus on things that I couldn't do before without automated agents, at least at the going price. The kind of automation I'm doing is more like building a set of agents to generate marketing surveys for me. They take free form input from me and my project. They aren't particularly sexy but they go off and do something valuable that I literally would never pay for at the prices that they are normally.
- takinola 7mo ago
  This is a really tempting approach but I think it is the wrong one. The issue is one of trajectory. OpenClaw has the attention of thousands of hackers and there is a huge incentive to contribute to make it better. That will compound very quickly and will become much better than whatever private solution you create.
deleted 7mo ago
[deleted]
thomasfromcdnjs 7mo ago
I've been super impressed with this genealogy workflow -> https://github.com/mattprusak/autoresearch-genealogy https://github.com/mattprusak/autoresearch-genealogy Somewhere should definitely make this for missing persons.
nunez 7mo ago
Doing this isn't trivial if you're traveling heavily throughout the week and have lots of people vying for your attention. However, these folks usually have an exec assistant to help them wrangle the chaos. Morever, them using a Claw would likely be a huge security risk, as this kind of person is much more likely to be a high-profile target.
jnaina 7mo ago
agreed. using my locally hosted LLM, created a skill on OpenClaw to export data from sfdc and build my weekly sales report, complete with charts, summary of deals, meddpicc updates. some small tweaking required to be 100% production ready, but already saved about 4-5 hours of my weekly time spend on this. this plus a whole bunch of other skills (credit card payments notification and itemization/spend tracking, utilities (power/water) anomalies monitoring, daily solar power generation tracking and solar battery health checks, homelab maintenance (apt upgrades, storage cleanups, etc), media management, UPS battery health tracking, NAS disk heath tracking, etc). I believe OpenClaw is start of a new genre of "always on" personal assistant/agent (tied to a "skills" store) that handles all the drudgery of daily living. you get back something genuinely precious which is the headspace to focus on the work only you can do. with OpenClaw, we are currently at the "Visicalc" stage and I'm excited where this will eventually lead.
deleted 7mo ago
[deleted]
hgoel 7mo ago
I feel like part of it is the obsession with AI assistants a la Jarvis from Iron Man, but most people do not have the skills or need for an AI agent to support technical work, so they just end up trying to do mundane things that have already been largely streamlined by smartphones, while the primary advantages of these kind of agentic workflows are in technical work.
tchock23 7mo ago
I love when they use making a restaurant reservation as the example. On a list of things keep me up at night that is somewhere around #6,054, yet apparently for many tech bros that’s a top 10 life problem.

by Oarch 7mo ago

AlienRobot 7mo ago

For example?

Oarch 7mo ago
It would probably depend on the target audience. I was very impressed by Anthropic's swarm of agents building a C compiler earlier this year with 1000 PRs per hour. Easy to nitpick that it wasn't perfect, but it sure was impressive.
- refulgentis 7mo ago
  Right. Pretty impressive. What percentage of people will think that’s life changing? Because then we’re not talking about “can everyone up their demos to life changing, please?”, we’re talking about “can everyone use demos Oarch thinks are life changing, please?” - and “can build a MVP C compiler draft that barely works for $XXK” isn’t really that compelling to me, and we’re both software engineers, and my whole day job has been an agentic coder for…2.5 years?…now. My incentive structure and demographics are lined up perfectly to agree with you, but I don’t :/
  - Oarch 7mo ago
    I'm still sure we can do a little better though. Maybe a personalised diet and exercise plan based on a huge range of information: preferences, biometrics, habit forming, disposable income, your local area etc
    - refulgentis 7mo ago
      This is an excellent point and reminds me that, in some ways, the agentic coding stuff and ability for RL to hill climb on that and improve models quickly, has distracted from prompt engineering / putting more effort into getting data to them as a user.
    - greedo 7mo ago
      Like putting glue on your pizza?
- AlienRobot 7mo ago
  How many C compilers do we need...
  - deleted 7mo ago
    [deleted]
- pron 7mo ago
  You mean trying and failing to build a C compiler. This isn't a very hard task to begin with (assuming you know compilers, and the models do), but it was made unrealistically easy by giving the agents thousands of tests written by humans over years (on top of a spec and a reference implementation, both of which the models were trained on), and the agents still failed to converge. I was actually surprised that they failed as this was the purest possible example of "just do the coding" (something that isn't achievable in real or more complex cases) and when I read the description I thought they made it too easy, and in a way that isn't representative of real software. My thought at that failure was that if agents can't even build a C compiler with so much preparation effort put into the test, then we have some ways to go. Indeed, once you work a lot with agents for a while you see that coding isn't really their strong suit (although they are impressive at debugging).
- queenkjuul 7mo ago
  You're too easily impressed

refulgentis 7mo ago

> Can we up the quality of our examples just a bit? No. And there’s mundane answers why. People used to talk about phone home screens, back in the day, every iPhone had 16 spots It became wisdom everyone had the same 12 apps but then there were 4 that that were core for you and where most of your use went, but they were different apps from everyone else. So it goes for agent demos. Another reason: every agentic flow is a series of mundane steps that can be rounded to mundane and easy to do yourself. Value depends on how often you have to repeat them. If I have to book a flight once every year, I don’t need it and it’s mundane. There’s no life changing demo out there that someone won’t reply dismissively to. If there was, you’d see them somewhere, no? It’s been years of LLMs now. Put most bluntly: when faced with a contradiction, first, check your premises. The contradiction here being, everyone else doesn’t understand their agent demos are boring and if just one person finally put a little work and imagination into it, they’d be life changing.

otabdeveloper4 7mo ago
There are easy no-brainer productivity boosts with LLMs. For example, automatically sorting your email by topic. Nobody shows this because the technology is still immature and very shit.
- driftnode 7mo ago
  honestly sorting email is the one thing that should have been solved five years ago. the tech is fine for classification. the problem is nobody wants to build a boring email sorter when you can announce an autonomous life assistant

usui 7mo ago

Have you seen how bad flight booking sites can get? I've had to download airline apps a majority of the time because the website failed to finish payment properly. I don't think we should call presentations visionless or fault them for wanting to solve this UX nightmare.

dawnerd 7mo ago
And this sounds like something you absolutely wouldn’t want an ai agent trying to figure out.
amanzi 7mo ago
And you want to add an unreliable, non-deterministic LLM into the flow too?
thinkingtoilet 7mo ago
That is never happened to me once.
- refulgentis 7mo ago
  [flagged]
gum_wobble 7mo ago
So the solution to bad design and enshittification is to have an horde of agents to throw at tasks now?
ceejayoz 7mo ago
> Have you seen how bad flight booking sites can get? Claude is pretty amazing, but it still goes down rabbit holes and makes obvious mistakes. Combining that with "oops I just bought a non-refundable flight to the wrong city" seems... unfun.

ForHackernews 7mo ago

The dream of the middle class IT drone is to become the executive Office Man: he shouts at his PA and she books his flights. Now AI can provide a simulacrum of his fondest aspiration, to be too important to click through booking.com and make someone else do it for him.

bitwize 7mo ago
Been a middle-class IT drone much of my adult life. This is not my dream. In fact I just realized that one reason I don't like AI dev tools is because they turn me into the kind of dickhead manager I despise: one who doesn't understand the code or the nature of the work involved, just gives orders on what needs to be built and complains when it doesn't work.
- never_inline 7mo ago
  I fix it by micromanaging it. Which class, method, function, module - I dictate the low level structure and features. I dump my all my hard earned coding opinions in a profoundly crafted markdown file.
  - bitwize 7mo ago
    What helps me adjust is what I call Thanos-coding: trying to get AI to do the thing with contexts and agents and SDD and whateverthefuck, and if it gets tangled on its own shoelace say "Fine. I'll do it myself." Alternatively: making its mistakes disappear with a snap of my fingers and starting over.
kbenson 7mo ago
Well, I've taken to describing the best responsible use of AI to help your work as though you have an executive assistant, so I can see why people would come to that conclusion. I don't tend to think of booking flights for that though, I tend to think of asking them to gather information and present it to me so I can review it for whether it's appropriate to include, probably with changes, in whatever I'm working on. Perhaps an executive assistant isn't the right term for that, or perhaps it's just that different people and different industries have vastly different ideas of how to make use of an executive assistant. I don't know enough to answer that.

sdoering 7mo ago

Not using OpenClaw - but I have a limited agent running that currently does a few things well. Morning Briefing: - it reads all my new email (multiple accounts and contexts), calendars (same accounts and contexts), slack (and other chat) messages (multiple slacks, matrix, discord, and so on), the weather reports, my open/closed recent to dos in a shared list across all my devices, my latest journal/log entries of things done. Has access for cross referencing to my "people files" to get context on mails/appointments and chat messages. From all this, as well as my RSS feeds, it generates a comprehensive yet short-ish morning briefing I receive on weekdays at 7am. Two minutes and I have a good grasp of my day, important meetings/deadlines/to dos, possible scheduling conflicts across the multiple calendars (that are not syncable due to corporate policies). This is a very high level overview that already enables me to plan my day better, reschedule things if necessary. And start the day focused on my most important open tasks/topics. More often than not this enables me to keep the laptop closed and do the conceptual work first without getting sucked into email. Or teams. By the way: Sadly teams is not accessible to it right now. MS Power Automate sadly does not enable forwarding the content of chats. Unlike with emails or calendar appointments. Just for that alone it is worth having it to me. YMMV. I also can fire a research request via chat. It does that and writes the results into a file that gets synced to my other devices. Meaning I have it available at any device within a minute or so. Really handy sometimes. It also runs a few regular research tasks on a schedule. And a bit of prep work for copy writing and stuff like this. Currently it is just a hobby/play project. But the morning briefing to me is easily worth an hour of my day. Totally worth running it on my infra without additional costs.

aftbit 7mo ago
>possible scheduling conflicts across the multiple calendars (that are not syncable due to corporate policies) Doesn't this sorta defeat those policies though? Now all of your calendars are "synced" to a random unvalidated AI agent.
- localuser13 7mo ago
  Unless this whole setup is self-hosted (which I doubt), it's also uploaded to some data lake of a company which is in business of profiting from information. Intelligence agencies are really heading into a golden age, with everyone syncing all the data they have to the cloud, in plaintext. I mean it was already bad, but it's somehow getting worse.

bluGill 7mo ago

They are only trivial in the simple case. When you need a bunch of busy people in a meeting it becomes hard to book a meeting. If several people need to travel incuding get a visa it is hard to fit it all it between other meetings that refuired people caanot skip. travel is hard when you are trying for the best deal across flights, hotels and such. many sites only guarentee prices for 15 minutes so you can't even get all the needed prices on a spreadsheet at once - particularly if you have flevible travel dates. I've booked a best price plane ticket only to discover it was the worst date for hotels and I could have saved money on a more expensive flight.

mjr00 7mo ago

> why are the examples given of futuristic capabilities always so visionless - it's always booking a flight or scheduling a meeting. This AI wave is filled with "ideas guys/gals" who thought they had an amazing awesome idea and if only they knew how to program they could make a best-selling billion dollar idea, being confronted with the reality that their ideas are really uninteresting as well. They're still happy to write blog posts about how their bleeding-edge Claw setup sends them a push notification whenever someone comments on one of their LinkedIn posts, though.

stbtrax 7mo ago
the whole obsequious nature of how LLMs also amp them up thinking they're onto something incredible is throwing gas on this dumpster fire. "What a great idea! This will revolutionize linkedin commenting. Let's implement it together."
- johnisgood 7mo ago
  Oh for sure. When I present something to the LLM it always tells me how great it is until I make it "question" it, then it says it was overestimating this or that. Eh. Quite annoying.
  - Jimmc414 7mo ago
    https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/s/qfBsFB2IzU https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/s/qfBsFB2IzU
    - deleted 7mo ago
      [deleted]
  - salawat 7mo ago
    You have to remember that LLM's don't have any persistent capacity to hold a "judgement". You ask for something, it provides an attempt at a completion for it. No fact checking, no reasoning, just a plausible looking output, tuned to hopefully get you to repeat the interaction. Half the reason the dominant UX is a "Chat" is that's the only way to provide a facsimile of memory or persistence across requests. Append the last few turns, press go. Over time you can develop an eye for the model's tics/attractor topics. Remember that they bill by token use, and suddenly, the entire UX/architecture starts making sense.

Barrin92 7mo ago

>There are real, impressive examples of the power of agentic flows there aren't, and just like the blockchain "industry" with its "surely this is going to be the killer app" we're going to be in this circus until the money dries up. Just like the note-taking craze, the crypto ecosystem and now AI there's an almost inverse relation between the people advocating it and actually doing any meaningful work. The more anyone's pushing it the faster you should run into the opposite direction.

aftbit 7mo ago
I'm gonna keep saying this forever - there are two obvious "killer apps" for crypto: 1. Semi-private blockchains, where you can rely on an actor not to be actively malicious, but still want to be able to cryptographically hold them to a past statement (think banks settling up with each other) 2. NFTs for tracking physical products through a logistics supply chain. Every time a container moves from one node to the next in a physical logistics chain (which includes tons of low trust "last mile" carriers), its corresponding NFT changes ownership as well. This could become as granular as there's money to support. These would both provide material advantages above and beyond a centralized SQL database as there's no obvious central party that is trusted enough to operate that database. Neither has anything to do with retail investors or JPEGs though, so they'll never moon and you'll never hear about them.
- mjr00 7mo ago
  AFAIK both of these use cases had many millions of invested dollars dumped into them during the Blockchain hype and neither resulted in anything. It might not be an exact match for (1), but there was famously the ASX blockchain project[0] which turned out to be a total failure. For (2), IBM made "Farmer Connect"[1], which is now almost entirely scrubbed from their website, which promised to do supply chain logistics on a blockchain. [0] https://www.reuters.com/markets/australian-stock-exchanges-blockchain-failure-burns-market-trust-2022-12-20/ https://www.reuters.com/markets/australian-stock-exchanges-b... [1] https://mediacenter.ibm.com/media/Farmer+Connect+%2B+IBM/1_8nksvgym https://mediacenter.ibm.com/media/Farmer+Connect+%2B+IBM/1_8...

sxg 7mo ago

Some of it is lack of imagination, but some of it is because many truly visionary examples would largely sound stupid to most of today's audience. Imagine it's 2007 and you're explaining how the smartphone will change society over the next 20 years: - A photo sharing app will change restaurants, public spaces, and the entire travel industry across the world - The smartphone will bring about regime change in Egypt, Tunisia, Lebanon, and other countries in ~4 years - We'll replace taxis and hotels by getting rides and sharing homes with strangers - Billions of people across the world will never need to own a desktop or laptop - A short video sharing app will kill TV - QR codes become relevant Most of these would be a hard sell at the time.

namibj 7mo ago
Instagram Arabian spring Uber Airbnb Cloud-ification/shift to web apps and mobile-first ....tiktok? Or is YouTube considered "short video sharing app"? Because I see no evidence tiktok in particular killing TV... To be fair, QR code did hit print magazines/newspapers in Germany (just as an example; English wiki was not elaborating on initial history of public use/perception) in late 2007, so that one wasn't nearly as far-fetched.
- butlike 7mo ago
  Not only is TV alive and well, we're even getting channels back with the content splintered across multiple streaming platforms.
runarberg 7mo ago
None of these actually were hard to sell. In 2007 we had mobile phones, we had mp3 players (the iPod was actually very good), we had CouchSurfing, etc. I think the smart phone revolution is actually pretty overstated. It basically only made computers cheaper and handier to carry (but also more walled gardens). There are a few capabilities of smart phones we do today which we didn’t with do with computers and mobile phones back in 2007, such as navigation (GPS were a thing but not used much by the general public). Your case would be much stronger if you’d use the World Wide Web as your analogy, as in 1995 it would by hard to convince anybody how important it would be to maintain a web presence. And nobody would guess a social media like the irc would blow up into something other then a toy. However I think the analogy with smartphones are actually more apt, this AI revolution has made statistical models more accessible, but we are only using them for things we were already capable of before, and unlike the web, and much like smartphones, I don’t think that will actually change. But unlike smartphones, it will always be cheaper and often even easier to use the alternatives.

sylos 7mo ago

I think some folks want a legitmate personal assistant/secretary like ceo's and wealthy people have but ai. I think that's a good goal. Modern cells and pdas kinda fell short of "your own literal secretary" and I think people want that. Still we should continue pushing the boundaries beyond that.

the_snooze 7mo ago
The purpose of a personal assistant isn’t to fit people into your calendar. It’s to filter them out. They serve as a barrier to your time, not an enabler for other people to claim it. I don’t see how an AI can meaningfully accomplish that any better than simply just making yourself more difficult to reach.
- blackcatsec 7mo ago
  This is it right here. I've long thought about this one and whether I should bother with an AI agent that can do all of this stuff for me, but the reality is both what you said and I'm not rich enough. Do I want the AI Agent to take my bank account and automatically pay some bill every month in full? What if you go a little over that month due to an emergency expense you weren't prepared for? And it's not a matter of "I don't have enough in my bank account for this one time charge", but it's "I don't have enough in my bank account for this charge and 3 others coming at the end of the month." type deal. Agents aren't going to be very good at that. "Hey I paid $3,000 on your credit card in order to prevent you from incurring interest. Interest is really bad to carry on a credit card and you should minimize that as much as possible." Me: "Yeah but I needed that money for rent this month." Agent: "Oh, yeah! I should have taken that into account! It looks like we can't reverse the charge for the payment." Yeah, no fucking thank you LOL.
  - mrguyorama 7mo ago
    >Do I want the AI Agent to take my bank account and automatically pay some bill every month in full? Also this supposed use case is called "Autopay" and requires zero AI. A lot of people still don't use it. Even when it includes a discount!

endofreach 7mo ago

> There are real, impressive examples of the power of agentic flows out there. Can we up the quality of our examples just a bit? Please don't. The reason we're still enjoying the bit of the old world as we know it, is just because nobody has really figured it out yet. Enjoy the moment, while it lasts.

enraged_camel 7mo ago
What does this even mean? By definition, we have been enjoying "the moment" for quite a while now. What is so special about it that we should work to prolong it, and to avoid moving forward?

prmoustache 7mo ago

[dead]

ljm 7mo ago

The real impressive examples get turned into SaaS prototypes and not placeholders for your imagination. If they had vision they wouldn't be thrown out in a blog post.

timacles 7mo ago
This is the tech equivalent of my girlfriend goes to another school. If someone implemented something impressive with this stuff, they wouldnt be keeping it quiet. False negatives are unproductive

brotchie 7mo ago

OpenClaw is just like any other tool, you need to learn it before its power is available to you. Just like anything in engineering really: you have to play around source control to understand source control, you have to play around with database indexes to learn how to optimize a database. Once you've learned it and incorporated it into your tool set, you then have that to wield in solving problems "oh, damn, a database index is perfect for this." To this end, folks doing flights and scheduling meetings using OpenClaw are really in that exploration / learning phase. They tackle the first (possibly uninventive thing) that comes to mind to just dive in and learn. The real wins come down the line when you're tackling some business / personal life problem and go: "wait a second, an OpenClaw agent would be perfect for this!"

imiric 7mo ago
> OpenClaw is just like any other tool, you need to learn it before its power is available to you. That's ridiculous. The utility of any tool is usually knowable before using it. That's how most tools work. I don't need to learn how to drive a car to know what I could use it for. I learn to drive it because I want to benefit from it, not the other way around. It's the same with computers and any program. I use it to accomplish a specific task, not to discover the tasks it could be useful for. OpenClaw is yet another tool in search of a problem, like most of the "AI" ecosystem. When the bubble bursts, nobody will remember these tools, and we'll be able to focus on technology that solves problems people actually have.
- wyre 7mo ago
  Such a wrong take. The utility of a program like Excel, Obsidian, Notion, Unity, Jupyter, or Emacs far beyond the knowledge of knowing how to use the product. All of these products are hammers with nails as far as your creativity will take you. Its wild to have be on a website called Hacker News, talking about a product that can make a computer do seemingly anything, and insisting its a tool in search of a problem.
  - deleted 7mo ago
    [deleted]

lxgr 7mo ago

That's a fair point, and I guess the marketing problem here is intrinsic: If the problem is trivial, off-the-shelf solutions abound; if it's idiosyncratic, almost nobody will be able to relate (as you can't assume that people will do the transfer of "if it can solve complex problem I don't understand A, it'll probably be able to solve my complex problem B" for promotional material).

davidw 7mo ago

Booking a flight is the kind of thing I want to dedicate my full attention to. It's expensive, and the timing and details matter a lot. I'm happy for the voice assistant to add stuff to my grocery list, though. The consequences are not serious if it screws up a letter or something.

etiam 7mo ago
Booking a flight is the kind of thing I'd really want to avoid doing myself nowadays if possible though. Surveying the offers is usually such a snake pit of deceptive marketing and incomplete service conditions that I feel somewhat nauseous just at the prospect of having to look at it. I wouldn't remotely trust a software assistant to deal with all that misdirection autonomously, but I guess I'd be prepared to give it a chance collating options with tolerable time and cost, attempting to make the price include the stuff that has to be added to preserve health, sanity and a modicum of human dignity.
- davidw 7mo ago
  Asking it to find the best deal? Sure, I could totally see that. But I want to double check that myself and actually buy it in order to make sure my flight to Denver from Portland doesn't have a layover in Anchorage or something.
- joquarky 7mo ago
  Nearly everything targeting consumers is a snake pit now. Everything has one or more upsells. Dark patterns are now nominal practice. Quality has gone to shit.
Ferret7446 7mo ago
We will get to the point where you'll trust it to catch those issues. The latest models can already do it sometimes for code, like explain that it considered various options and the tradeoffs between them.
ericd 7mo ago
Apparently I'm the only one here who finds it to be one of the worst things I ever have to do, I hate managing the combinatorial tab explosion by hand. Compounded by the adversarial nature of the price-setting algorithms that jack up the price on you if you show too much interest by researching too intensively. Just booked a flight for our family in two parts, and booking for one set of us made the price for the second set of us with a slightly different itinerary massively more expensive, because it was "in demand". Can't wait for agents to handle all of it.

zihotki 7mo ago

I also have the same concerns. I have my agenda meeting free and create meetings like once a few weeks. The same is for booking flight tickets - once a decade. Adding openclaw there would take more time and effort than doing it manually. And none of the friends playing with openclaw have any useful non-trivial workflows which can't be automated in oldschool way. The only viable workflow so far I could think of - build your own knowledge base and info processing pipeline.

Waterluvian 7mo ago

[dead]

gherkinnn 7mo ago

It's either vague notions like "more important than the invention fire", or concrete cases like booking trips that the likes of Google can enshittify at lightspeed. I am not optimistic, not because the techs is lacking, but the context in which it is born is awful.

tyingq 7mo ago

> Doing this manually is already pretty trivial Well, and doing them programmatically and automatically without any AI is also possible, if not trivial...and has been for some time.

mandeepj 7mo ago

> booking a flight > Doing this manually is already pretty trivial No, it’s not! You are the one who made it trivial by using three words to define! How about if I could only fly out between 9 am-noon next Friday? Also, combine it with hotel and rental car. Many times total $ between sites could be a difference of close to $200 or more along with better itinerary. That’s just the surface. The more preferences you add, the complex it becomes, so make it a right scenario for agent automation along with calendar management which has similar complexity.

procone 7mo ago
Still sounds trivial. Not sure why you're trying to make travel sound like a complex problem that can only be solved by burning tokens.
tacticus 7mo ago
get a travel agent? Probably more reliable and corp ones exist.
- mandeepj 7mo ago
  > get a travel agent? I think: to Uber founder, you’d have said get a driver or yellow cab :-) To TurboTax founder, you’d have said get a tax accountant :-)

mickdarling 7mo ago

I don't use Claw. It is way too dangerous. I built my own system where I know the ins and outs and how they can break. When it comes to agents' tasks, I tend to focus on things that I couldn't do before without automated agents, at least at the going price. The kind of automation I'm doing is more like building a set of agents to generate marketing surveys for me. They take free form input from me and my project. They aren't particularly sexy but they go off and do something valuable that I literally would never pay for at the prices that they are normally.

takinola 7mo ago
This is a really tempting approach but I think it is the wrong one. The issue is one of trajectory. OpenClaw has the attention of thousands of hackers and there is a huge incentive to contribute to make it better. That will compound very quickly and will become much better than whatever private solution you create.

deleted 7mo ago

[deleted]

thomasfromcdnjs 7mo ago

I've been super impressed with this genealogy workflow -> https://github.com/mattprusak/autoresearch-genealogy https://github.com/mattprusak/autoresearch-genealogy Somewhere should definitely make this for missing persons.

nunez 7mo ago

Doing this isn't trivial if you're traveling heavily throughout the week and have lots of people vying for your attention. However, these folks usually have an exec assistant to help them wrangle the chaos. Morever, them using a Claw would likely be a huge security risk, as this kind of person is much more likely to be a high-profile target.

jnaina 7mo ago

agreed. using my locally hosted LLM, created a skill on OpenClaw to export data from sfdc and build my weekly sales report, complete with charts, summary of deals, meddpicc updates. some small tweaking required to be 100% production ready, but already saved about 4-5 hours of my weekly time spend on this. this plus a whole bunch of other skills (credit card payments notification and itemization/spend tracking, utilities (power/water) anomalies monitoring, daily solar power generation tracking and solar battery health checks, homelab maintenance (apt upgrades, storage cleanups, etc), media management, UPS battery health tracking, NAS disk heath tracking, etc). I believe OpenClaw is start of a new genre of "always on" personal assistant/agent (tied to a "skills" store) that handles all the drudgery of daily living. you get back something genuinely precious which is the headspace to focus on the work only you can do. with OpenClaw, we are currently at the "Visicalc" stage and I'm excited where this will eventually lead.

deleted 7mo ago

[deleted]

hgoel 7mo ago

I feel like part of it is the obsession with AI assistants a la Jarvis from Iron Man, but most people do not have the skills or need for an AI agent to support technical work, so they just end up trying to do mundane things that have already been largely streamlined by smartphones, while the primary advantages of these kind of agentic workflows are in technical work.

tchock23 7mo ago

I love when they use making a restaurant reservation as the example. On a list of things keep me up at night that is somewhere around #6,054, yet apparently for many tech bros that’s a top 10 life problem.