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Great guidance hidden in here for making it expensive for agents to navigate your website. Move elements on screen as the mouse moves, force natural mouse movem

Great guidance hidden in here for making it expensive for agents to navigate your website. Move elements on screen as the mouse moves, force natural mouse movement to make the UI work, change the button labels in the JS to be randomly named every visit, force scrolling to the bottom of the screen to check for hidden extra tasks... Hang on, that sounds like common corporate SaaS apps.

notjustanymike 6mo ago
Ah damn it, we invented Jira
- fooker 6mo ago
  Jira from first principles Almost sounds like an Orielly book
  - QuantumNomad_ 6mo ago
    The O’Reilly animal for Jira is apparently some kind of duck or goose. Matthew B. Doar (2011). Practical JIRA Plugins. O’Reilly. https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/practical-jira-plugins/9781449311322/ https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/practical-jira-plugins/... In case anyone was wondering. Which they probably weren’t :p
    - fooker 6mo ago
      I'm more interested in the next volume: impractical Jira plugins
      - SAI_Peregrinus 6mo ago
        I'm sure the doohickeycorporation folks on Reddit can come up with some.
    - phatskat 5mo ago
      According to O’Reilly’s Animal Menagerie [1] it’s a King Duck [1] https://www.oreilly.com/animals.csp?x-search=duck&x-sort=oldest https://www.oreilly.com/animals.csp?x-search=duck&x-sort=old...
- drob518 6mo ago
  Real LOL!
zmmmmm 6mo ago
It's really weird, I'm seeing across the board that people who never believed in them before are suddenly all into good software eng practices (starting with writing a spec) because of AI. It's kind of fascinating that we never were willing to do these things for humans but now that AI needs it ... we are all in. A bit depressing in the sense that I think mostly the reason we happy to do it for AI is that we perceive it will benefit us personally rather than some abstract future human.
- taneq 6mo ago
  It’s an interesting psychological phenomenon. It’s like the way I keep my house way tidier since I got a robot vacuum. Pick things up off the floor for aesthetics’ sake? Nah. Pick them up because the vacuum will attempt to eat them and might get sick? Of course!
- GarnetFloride 6mo ago
  My manager just told me that after 12 years of trying to get one of the founders to understand the difference between dev docs and user docs, they tried getting Claude to do it and he finally got it that they are different. He'd been saying this whole time that customer could just read the dev docs. If they could they wouldn't need our software.
  - zenoprax 6mo ago
    How firm is the boundary between a dev doc and a user doc in your opinion? I have found that the overlap can be quite large if the users are also technically proficient. Right now I'm trying to balance "how X works so you can use the app better" with "how X works so you can contribute or build your own plugin". DeepWiki really helps as a backstop for anything not already covered though it's not without its own caveats of course.
    - PetitPrince 6mo ago
      Not OP but I think you have the right intuition in making a difference between using the app / contribute to the app. You may want to read https://diataxis.fr/ https://diataxis.fr/ which elaborate on this idea and add another dimension (action / cognition) to this.
MereInterest 6mo ago
The trick is that you make it something that humans want to do. Using [0] as an example, the interactive elements move, with context-dependent environment interactions. [0] https://www.cs.unm.edu/~dlchao/papers/p152-chao.pdf https://www.cs.unm.edu/~dlchao/papers/p152-chao.pdf
cco 6mo ago
You can have both! haha We built isagent.dev for exactly this reason, serve human content to humans, serve agent optimized content to agents.
- windexh8er 6mo ago
  Do people really need or want more bandaids?
  - cco 6mo ago
    I view it more through the lens of serving the right content to the right audience. Markdown is great for agents (and some humans), it is not great for many humans. And it _certainly_ isn't acceptable to some humans that have the job title "designer" ;) If you want to take the stance that those designers (and people who don't want to consume plain text web) are wrong, sure I guess. But I prefer to take the stance that people and agents should receive content in their desired format.
jasomill 6mo ago
I had one project where a desktop application deliberately hid the contents of all grid controls from Windows accessibility APIs, took measures to ensure checkbox and radio button selections made through accessibility APIs did not register, and all functions that allowed data to be exported were protected by CAPTCHAs. Generative AI wasn't a thing at the time, but I had to resort to a combination of OCR, simulated user input, and print capture to drive the application and export data. Had the developers been aware of the Windows DRM APIs that block screen capture, or the fact that text is easily recoverable from PostScript files with minimal formatting, I don't know what I would have done. The irony is that the process this replaced involved giving cheap offshore labor full read-only remote access to all data in the system, which was by any measure a far more serious security risk than otherwise authorized employees using tools running locally with no network access provided by established, trustworthy vendors to automate their work.
tdeck 6mo ago
So ASP WebForms was the technology we needed all along?

notjustanymike 6mo ago

Ah damn it, we invented Jira

fooker 6mo ago
Jira from first principles Almost sounds like an Orielly book
- QuantumNomad_ 6mo ago
  The O’Reilly animal for Jira is apparently some kind of duck or goose. Matthew B. Doar (2011). Practical JIRA Plugins. O’Reilly. https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/practical-jira-plugins/9781449311322/ https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/practical-jira-plugins/... In case anyone was wondering. Which they probably weren’t :p
  - fooker 6mo ago
    I'm more interested in the next volume: impractical Jira plugins
    - SAI_Peregrinus 6mo ago
      I'm sure the doohickeycorporation folks on Reddit can come up with some.
  - phatskat 5mo ago
    According to O’Reilly’s Animal Menagerie [1] it’s a King Duck [1] https://www.oreilly.com/animals.csp?x-search=duck&x-sort=oldest https://www.oreilly.com/animals.csp?x-search=duck&x-sort=old...
drob518 6mo ago
Real LOL!

zmmmmm 6mo ago

It's really weird, I'm seeing across the board that people who never believed in them before are suddenly all into good software eng practices (starting with writing a spec) because of AI. It's kind of fascinating that we never were willing to do these things for humans but now that AI needs it ... we are all in. A bit depressing in the sense that I think mostly the reason we happy to do it for AI is that we perceive it will benefit us personally rather than some abstract future human.

taneq 6mo ago
It’s an interesting psychological phenomenon. It’s like the way I keep my house way tidier since I got a robot vacuum. Pick things up off the floor for aesthetics’ sake? Nah. Pick them up because the vacuum will attempt to eat them and might get sick? Of course!
GarnetFloride 6mo ago
My manager just told me that after 12 years of trying to get one of the founders to understand the difference between dev docs and user docs, they tried getting Claude to do it and he finally got it that they are different. He'd been saying this whole time that customer could just read the dev docs. If they could they wouldn't need our software.
- zenoprax 6mo ago
  How firm is the boundary between a dev doc and a user doc in your opinion? I have found that the overlap can be quite large if the users are also technically proficient. Right now I'm trying to balance "how X works so you can use the app better" with "how X works so you can contribute or build your own plugin". DeepWiki really helps as a backstop for anything not already covered though it's not without its own caveats of course.
  - PetitPrince 6mo ago
    Not OP but I think you have the right intuition in making a difference between using the app / contribute to the app. You may want to read https://diataxis.fr/ https://diataxis.fr/ which elaborate on this idea and add another dimension (action / cognition) to this.

MereInterest 6mo ago

The trick is that you make it something that humans want to do. Using [0] as an example, the interactive elements move, with context-dependent environment interactions. [0] https://www.cs.unm.edu/~dlchao/papers/p152-chao.pdf https://www.cs.unm.edu/~dlchao/papers/p152-chao.pdf

cco 6mo ago

You can have both! haha We built isagent.dev for exactly this reason, serve human content to humans, serve agent optimized content to agents.

windexh8er 6mo ago
Do people really need or want more bandaids?
- cco 6mo ago
  I view it more through the lens of serving the right content to the right audience. Markdown is great for agents (and some humans), it is not great for many humans. And it _certainly_ isn't acceptable to some humans that have the job title "designer" ;) If you want to take the stance that those designers (and people who don't want to consume plain text web) are wrong, sure I guess. But I prefer to take the stance that people and agents should receive content in their desired format.

jasomill 6mo ago

I had one project where a desktop application deliberately hid the contents of all grid controls from Windows accessibility APIs, took measures to ensure checkbox and radio button selections made through accessibility APIs did not register, and all functions that allowed data to be exported were protected by CAPTCHAs. Generative AI wasn't a thing at the time, but I had to resort to a combination of OCR, simulated user input, and print capture to drive the application and export data. Had the developers been aware of the Windows DRM APIs that block screen capture, or the fact that text is easily recoverable from PostScript files with minimal formatting, I don't know what I would have done. The irony is that the process this replaced involved giving cheap offshore labor full read-only remote access to all data in the system, which was by any measure a far more serious security risk than otherwise authorized employees using tools running locally with no network access provided by established, trustworthy vendors to automate their work.

tdeck 6mo ago

So ASP WebForms was the technology we needed all along?