4 ms·

I've been using it for the last month or so. IMO in the same way we went from tab complete -> prompts -> agents, this feels like a next step on that evolution.

by jjcm 2mo ago

I've been using it for the last month or so. IMO in the same way we went from tab complete -> prompts -> agents, this feels like a next step on that evolution. I highly suspect others will be following suit. I was surprised with how much it felt natural to interact with agents in this way. Biggest advantage is each one owns its own routines, context, and domain, and they can communicate between each other. Similar to hermes they build out their own skills, but by keeping the bots separated by domains, you end up getting better results out of them. Additionally though each one has their own computer, which means async work feels like it actually works. I haven't had to juggle worktrees for the last month. Biggest downsides are token expenditure. I've used more tokens this month than not this month. That's not a typo - I've used less tokens in the last 5 years prior to this month than I have this month. Always on perpetual agents use a LOT of tokens. IMO this is building for the future state where tokens are vastly cheaper, ie in a post-ASIC world. The coolest thing I had it do for me was sourcing fabric for swag: https://image.non.io/d83664c1-5807-4a18-abe4-41928c198410.webp https://image.non.io/d83664c1-5807-4a18-abe4-41928c198410.we... I wanted to make something that didn't feel like just my logo on a shirt, so I had one of my bots reach out to ~40 fabric suppliers in vietnam, negotiate prices, lock one in, and get samples made. First samples should be finished today. It's been something I've wanted to do for ages, so it was cool seeing it actually happen. The fabric supplier bot worked with one of my prototyper bots to create a randomly generated pattern using my logo, which it then sent as a .ai file to the supplier.

pavel_lishin 2mo ago
> I wanted to make something that didn't feel like just my logo on a shirt, so I had one of my bots reach out to ~40 fabric suppliers in vietnam, negotiate prices, lock one in, and get samples made. Isn't this one of the problems foreseen with this? For you, it was a single prompt - for 40 companies, this probably took up some time. What happens when fifty people fire off a 15-second "get me a shirt" prompt? When five hundred, five thousand, five million do?
- jjcm 2mo ago
  A reasonable pushback. It originally only reached out to 5, didnt hear back, so reached out to 5 more. I personally pushed it to reach out to an additional 30 after that. One of the difficulties of sourcing this is a lot of the suppliers in vietnam are only contactable via whatsapp. Emails are monitored far less. It's one of the reasons I haven't been successful with this in the past despite trying - it's a very word-of-mouth network.
  - pavel_lishin 2mo ago
    I don't think your reply addresses the point of my comment at all, which is that people receiving messages from AI agents isn't scalable in the same way that people sending messages from AI agents is.
    - jbs789 2mo ago
      And more generally, very often the recipient of an email bears more cost than the sender. I heard this once and keep it in mind for every email I send. How do I reduce the cost of replying. Many times it means getting on the phone/ not sending the email at all.
      - XCSme 2mo ago
        Isn't a phone call like 10x more taxing than an email reply?
        pavel_lishin 2mo ago
        Very likely varies person by person, and topic by topic. I don't like speaking on the phone, but there are some things where a single 3 minute phone call is much simpler and easier than a seven email reply chain spanning four days.
        toofy 2mo ago
        it entirely depends on the topic. an example is realizing the queries will end up with multiple back and forths. for a lot of things a phone call can solve something in minutes and it’s cleared from your brain queue. while some emails end up with back and forth waiting for each others responses. that’s can be hours or days where it sits in your brain as yet another task to manage. wasteful for something that could have easily been tied up with a quick phone call.
- raincole 2mo ago
  Isn't the answer obvious? The 40 companies will have to use AI to filter the messages too. If your business is selling tokens, it'd be extremely lucrative for you if the whole society relies on tokens to perform basic operations. That's where we're heading to.
  - slg 2mo ago
    Everything is becoming wildly inefficient, all in the name of improved efficiency.
    - dgellow 2mo ago
      And everybody in the chain can even justify their improved efficiency! It‘s capitalism endgoal. A massive Goldberg machine, where each piece can be optimized, but overall does produce close to no value compared to its cost and effort
      - Taek 2mo ago
        I have a hard time looking at the world around me and thinking "close to no value"
        dgellow 2mo ago
        I’m talking specifically about the AI industry
        brookst 2mo ago
        Well, how does it compare to the internet industry?
        dgellow 2mo ago
        Let me know, I personally don’t see meaningful comparisons to make between the 2
- aaron695 2mo ago
  [dead]
- dylan604 2mo ago
  This is what happens when you place a "contact us for a quote" form on your website. You will get a high percentage of requests that lead no where. Do you have any experience with a company that receives RFQs to land business? You will spend a lot of time answering all of the questions and digging around to ensure you can actually do what is requested spending days/weeks on it. Only for the work to go somewhere else. In fact, a lot of places require multiple quotes for work, so when they have someone they know they want to work with, they still have to have other companies spin their wheels. They have no qualms about it knowing they are wasting the other companies' time. It's pretty much how things are done.
  - pavel_lishin 2mo ago
    > You will get a high percentage of requests that lead no where Yes, but as per my last email, previously those were limited by the human scale of those requests.
    - b473a 2mo ago
      The fact that tokens aren't free will limit the number of unserious requests. Email is free, and so there's a lot of spam emails sitting in my inbox, but tokens aren't. On the other hand, op said he had wanted to do this for years but never had the time / ability. We can probably assume any increase in unserious requests will come with an increase in serious requests from people paying for the tokens to get the quotes.
      - Gormo 2mo ago
        > The fact that tokens aren't free will limit the number of unserious requests. Email is free, and so there's a lot of spam emails sitting in my inbox, but tokens aren't. Back when email was new, using it required paying an hourly fee to a proprietary online service. Then, with economies of scale and protocol standardization, it got to the point where the resources needed for email were so minimal that unlimited usage could be baked into flat-rate service offerings, and anyone who cared to could run their own SMTP/POP/IMAP servers on commodity hardware. Using cloud-hosted LLMs is currently still in the "$5/hour CompuServe account" territory, but imagine what things might look like in five years.
- jryle70 2mo ago
  Have you ever been in sales? If the requests are real there would never be 5 thousands, let alone 5 millions (or the vendor would count their lucky stars). If they are spams that already happens today as well, at scale. AI bot would not change that. The vendor will never blindly make a sample just based on a single request. There will be back and forth. Maybe require proof that the inquirer is serious. Sending out RFP to 40 vendors isn't unusual.
  - phatfish 2mo ago
    The AI bot does change it, random spam emails get ignored already as you say. A request from an AI agent doesn't, as the parent showed. Now anyone can source 40 samples from Vietnamese factories and get a response, the sort of request that would only come from a serious buyer before AI agents impersonating humans were a thing.
    - b473a 2mo ago
      Tokens aren't free so there's already some level of buy-in on the part of the human sending out the agent. The amount of unserious requests will be limited by the cost of the tokens to run the agents. On the other hand op said they'd been wanting to do this for years but never had the time / ability. This is work that would otherwise not be happening.
- oefrha 2mo ago
  It’s really sad. I suppose for companies doing business online it’s just a (ballooning) cost of doing business, but for personal interactions it’s a disaster. I used to respond pretty enthusiastically to CTOs/team leads/recruiters reaching out who actually talk about details of my open source work as opposed to just sending a canned recruitment email. Nowadays I can’t be sure they’re not just using a bot to gather personalized details. Well, at least the last CTO reaching out to me said they found my profile while trawling with Claude, after I responded; appreciate the honesty I guess.
- duxup 2mo ago
  I haven't encountered bots but I've had several clients now send excel spreadsheets with requirements with just endless laundry lists of duplicate and semi duplicate and conflicting requirements. I strongly suspect they were the result of AI. These client's paid for the meeting digging through the mess so no loss but man ... it was horrible. The primary person responsible couldn't explain much at all but man they were proud they came up with some brutal spreadsheets.
- Bombthecat 2mo ago
  You need bots on th other side too. Simple
- 627467 2mo ago
  What's the difference between this and how its been done till now? When sourcing you'd typical prepare a same request and email the supliers similarly looking emails and they - if interest on business - would respond and start a back and forth. If anything now there will be more business. Filtering and triaging was always an issue you'd have to deal with and if the cost of dealing with small order is too high you just stop taking those and filter out large orders
- Oras 2mo ago
  There will be reservation fees to start the process that only charges when there is no-show or time wasters. Restaurants in London started charging when there is no show for reservations.
- zazuke 2mo ago
  I think that happens already with email. I get a ton of same emails "want to join my podcast" or "see my product" based on some github projects I did or so, clearly all ai written. Important to have a good screener in your email.
maherbeg 2mo ago
The token usage is really interesting. I would imagine the most efficient thing is to keep the state of everything persisted, and past the cache expiration window, to automatically start a new session with the previously persisted state instead of just a long running conversation. If someone solves this part of continual effective compaction + selective resetting at cache expiry, they're going to make a ton of money. Right now, only the token insensitive can use these sweet features.
chasd00 2mo ago
Would be interesting to read a write up on this in detail. I have a similar use case I’ve been tasked to solve for a consulting client.
thefourthchime 2mo ago
How is this different than, say, OpenClaw, which I've heard people say does the same kind of things? Is it that they each have their own VM?
- rsalus 2mo ago
  probably because it actually works
  - nozzlegear 2mo ago
    What prevented openclaw from working, and what does grok bot do differently that makes it succeed where openclaw fails?
    - natedagreat22 2mo ago
      [flagged]
    - thenbrent 1mo ago
      It was the software updates that prevented OpenClaw working for me. OpenClaw broke every update for a month, so I gave up and moved to Hermes. Right now Grok Bot looks a lot easier to get started and maintain with a simpler UI (arguably better), but OpenClaw and Hermes give you more configurability and choice. Grok Bot is really built on a different paradigm to OpenClaw/Hermes so hard to say it succeeds where those two fail, because fundamentally, one offers the convenience of SaaS, while the others offer the freedom and ownership of open source.
o_____________o 2mo ago
> I highly suspect others will be following suit. There is https://github.com/block/buzz https://github.com/block/buzz https://buzz.xyz/ https://buzz.xyz/ though currently much worse
- thenbrent 1mo ago
  Yeah Buzz is rough still, but something valuable it offers that Grok Bot doesn't is human-to-human communication. It seems like Grok Bot is just a personal agent swarm. Which is useful to be sure, but it was surprising to me that's all it offers because it does so in a group chat app. I just assumed it was like Buzz at first, allowing you to invite other humans to work with the bots. Bot-to-bot only group chat is useful, but I also really love Buzz's vision for team collaboration with many humans and many bots working in the same chat interface.
jstummbillig 2mo ago
I think you are right saying that we will have more of this, but I don't really understand the upside is of this in the context of the work you described. > The coolest thing I had it do for me was sourcing fabric for swag That seems like something codex could just have done on my laptop. Am I wrong?
rob74 2mo ago
> I've used less tokens in the last 5 years prior to this month than I have this month. So using a bot is almost like having an employee, but instead of a fixed salary, or even an hourly rate, they will just invoice you for whatever they think is necessary to do the tasks you give them? And agents can be very creative when coming up with ways to spend tokens...
nutjob2 2mo ago
> IMO this is building for the future state where tokens are vastly cheaper, ie in a post-ASIC world. Or in a world where tokens do not fuel AI, which is the more likely longer term outcome.
jrnichols 2mo ago
I'm really curious to hear how this shirt project turns out. Do you have a blog going on anywhere?

by jjcm 2mo ago

pavel_lishin 2mo ago

> I wanted to make something that didn't feel like just my logo on a shirt, so I had one of my bots reach out to ~40 fabric suppliers in vietnam, negotiate prices, lock one in, and get samples made. Isn't this one of the problems foreseen with this? For you, it was a single prompt - for 40 companies, this probably took up some time. What happens when fifty people fire off a 15-second "get me a shirt" prompt? When five hundred, five thousand, five million do?

jjcm 2mo ago
A reasonable pushback. It originally only reached out to 5, didnt hear back, so reached out to 5 more. I personally pushed it to reach out to an additional 30 after that. One of the difficulties of sourcing this is a lot of the suppliers in vietnam are only contactable via whatsapp. Emails are monitored far less. It's one of the reasons I haven't been successful with this in the past despite trying - it's a very word-of-mouth network.
- pavel_lishin 2mo ago
  I don't think your reply addresses the point of my comment at all, which is that people receiving messages from AI agents isn't scalable in the same way that people sending messages from AI agents is.
  - jbs789 2mo ago
    And more generally, very often the recipient of an email bears more cost than the sender. I heard this once and keep it in mind for every email I send. How do I reduce the cost of replying. Many times it means getting on the phone/ not sending the email at all.
    - XCSme 2mo ago
      Isn't a phone call like 10x more taxing than an email reply?
      - pavel_lishin 2mo ago
        Very likely varies person by person, and topic by topic. I don't like speaking on the phone, but there are some things where a single 3 minute phone call is much simpler and easier than a seven email reply chain spanning four days.
      - toofy 2mo ago
        it entirely depends on the topic. an example is realizing the queries will end up with multiple back and forths. for a lot of things a phone call can solve something in minutes and it’s cleared from your brain queue. while some emails end up with back and forth waiting for each others responses. that’s can be hours or days where it sits in your brain as yet another task to manage. wasteful for something that could have easily been tied up with a quick phone call.
raincole 2mo ago
Isn't the answer obvious? The 40 companies will have to use AI to filter the messages too. If your business is selling tokens, it'd be extremely lucrative for you if the whole society relies on tokens to perform basic operations. That's where we're heading to.
- slg 2mo ago
  Everything is becoming wildly inefficient, all in the name of improved efficiency.
  - dgellow 2mo ago
    And everybody in the chain can even justify their improved efficiency! It‘s capitalism endgoal. A massive Goldberg machine, where each piece can be optimized, but overall does produce close to no value compared to its cost and effort
    - Taek 2mo ago
      I have a hard time looking at the world around me and thinking "close to no value"
      - dgellow 2mo ago
        I’m talking specifically about the AI industry
        brookst 2mo ago
        Well, how does it compare to the internet industry?
        dgellow 2mo ago
        Let me know, I personally don’t see meaningful comparisons to make between the 2
aaron695 2mo ago
[dead]
dylan604 2mo ago
This is what happens when you place a "contact us for a quote" form on your website. You will get a high percentage of requests that lead no where. Do you have any experience with a company that receives RFQs to land business? You will spend a lot of time answering all of the questions and digging around to ensure you can actually do what is requested spending days/weeks on it. Only for the work to go somewhere else. In fact, a lot of places require multiple quotes for work, so when they have someone they know they want to work with, they still have to have other companies spin their wheels. They have no qualms about it knowing they are wasting the other companies' time. It's pretty much how things are done.
- pavel_lishin 2mo ago
  > You will get a high percentage of requests that lead no where Yes, but as per my last email, previously those were limited by the human scale of those requests.
  - b473a 2mo ago
    The fact that tokens aren't free will limit the number of unserious requests. Email is free, and so there's a lot of spam emails sitting in my inbox, but tokens aren't. On the other hand, op said he had wanted to do this for years but never had the time / ability. We can probably assume any increase in unserious requests will come with an increase in serious requests from people paying for the tokens to get the quotes.
    - Gormo 2mo ago
      > The fact that tokens aren't free will limit the number of unserious requests. Email is free, and so there's a lot of spam emails sitting in my inbox, but tokens aren't. Back when email was new, using it required paying an hourly fee to a proprietary online service. Then, with economies of scale and protocol standardization, it got to the point where the resources needed for email were so minimal that unlimited usage could be baked into flat-rate service offerings, and anyone who cared to could run their own SMTP/POP/IMAP servers on commodity hardware. Using cloud-hosted LLMs is currently still in the "$5/hour CompuServe account" territory, but imagine what things might look like in five years.
jryle70 2mo ago
Have you ever been in sales? If the requests are real there would never be 5 thousands, let alone 5 millions (or the vendor would count their lucky stars). If they are spams that already happens today as well, at scale. AI bot would not change that. The vendor will never blindly make a sample just based on a single request. There will be back and forth. Maybe require proof that the inquirer is serious. Sending out RFP to 40 vendors isn't unusual.
- phatfish 2mo ago
  The AI bot does change it, random spam emails get ignored already as you say. A request from an AI agent doesn't, as the parent showed. Now anyone can source 40 samples from Vietnamese factories and get a response, the sort of request that would only come from a serious buyer before AI agents impersonating humans were a thing.
  - b473a 2mo ago
    Tokens aren't free so there's already some level of buy-in on the part of the human sending out the agent. The amount of unserious requests will be limited by the cost of the tokens to run the agents. On the other hand op said they'd been wanting to do this for years but never had the time / ability. This is work that would otherwise not be happening.
oefrha 2mo ago
It’s really sad. I suppose for companies doing business online it’s just a (ballooning) cost of doing business, but for personal interactions it’s a disaster. I used to respond pretty enthusiastically to CTOs/team leads/recruiters reaching out who actually talk about details of my open source work as opposed to just sending a canned recruitment email. Nowadays I can’t be sure they’re not just using a bot to gather personalized details. Well, at least the last CTO reaching out to me said they found my profile while trawling with Claude, after I responded; appreciate the honesty I guess.
duxup 2mo ago
I haven't encountered bots but I've had several clients now send excel spreadsheets with requirements with just endless laundry lists of duplicate and semi duplicate and conflicting requirements. I strongly suspect they were the result of AI. These client's paid for the meeting digging through the mess so no loss but man ... it was horrible. The primary person responsible couldn't explain much at all but man they were proud they came up with some brutal spreadsheets.
Bombthecat 2mo ago
You need bots on th other side too. Simple
627467 2mo ago
What's the difference between this and how its been done till now? When sourcing you'd typical prepare a same request and email the supliers similarly looking emails and they - if interest on business - would respond and start a back and forth. If anything now there will be more business. Filtering and triaging was always an issue you'd have to deal with and if the cost of dealing with small order is too high you just stop taking those and filter out large orders
Oras 2mo ago
There will be reservation fees to start the process that only charges when there is no-show or time wasters. Restaurants in London started charging when there is no show for reservations.
zazuke 2mo ago
I think that happens already with email. I get a ton of same emails "want to join my podcast" or "see my product" based on some github projects I did or so, clearly all ai written. Important to have a good screener in your email.

maherbeg 2mo ago

The token usage is really interesting. I would imagine the most efficient thing is to keep the state of everything persisted, and past the cache expiration window, to automatically start a new session with the previously persisted state instead of just a long running conversation. If someone solves this part of continual effective compaction + selective resetting at cache expiry, they're going to make a ton of money. Right now, only the token insensitive can use these sweet features.

chasd00 2mo ago

Would be interesting to read a write up on this in detail. I have a similar use case I’ve been tasked to solve for a consulting client.

thefourthchime 2mo ago

How is this different than, say, OpenClaw, which I've heard people say does the same kind of things? Is it that they each have their own VM?

rsalus 2mo ago
probably because it actually works
- nozzlegear 2mo ago
  What prevented openclaw from working, and what does grok bot do differently that makes it succeed where openclaw fails?
  - natedagreat22 2mo ago
    [flagged]
  - thenbrent 1mo ago
    It was the software updates that prevented OpenClaw working for me. OpenClaw broke every update for a month, so I gave up and moved to Hermes. Right now Grok Bot looks a lot easier to get started and maintain with a simpler UI (arguably better), but OpenClaw and Hermes give you more configurability and choice. Grok Bot is really built on a different paradigm to OpenClaw/Hermes so hard to say it succeeds where those two fail, because fundamentally, one offers the convenience of SaaS, while the others offer the freedom and ownership of open source.

o_____________o 2mo ago

> I highly suspect others will be following suit. There is https://github.com/block/buzz https://github.com/block/buzz https://buzz.xyz/ https://buzz.xyz/ though currently much worse

thenbrent 1mo ago
Yeah Buzz is rough still, but something valuable it offers that Grok Bot doesn't is human-to-human communication. It seems like Grok Bot is just a personal agent swarm. Which is useful to be sure, but it was surprising to me that's all it offers because it does so in a group chat app. I just assumed it was like Buzz at first, allowing you to invite other humans to work with the bots. Bot-to-bot only group chat is useful, but I also really love Buzz's vision for team collaboration with many humans and many bots working in the same chat interface.

jstummbillig 2mo ago

I think you are right saying that we will have more of this, but I don't really understand the upside is of this in the context of the work you described. > The coolest thing I had it do for me was sourcing fabric for swag That seems like something codex could just have done on my laptop. Am I wrong?

rob74 2mo ago

> I've used less tokens in the last 5 years prior to this month than I have this month. So using a bot is almost like having an employee, but instead of a fixed salary, or even an hourly rate, they will just invoice you for whatever they think is necessary to do the tasks you give them? And agents can be very creative when coming up with ways to spend tokens...

nutjob2 2mo ago

> IMO this is building for the future state where tokens are vastly cheaper, ie in a post-ASIC world. Or in a world where tokens do not fuel AI, which is the more likely longer term outcome.

jrnichols 2mo ago

I'm really curious to hear how this shirt project turns out. Do you have a blog going on anywhere?