3 ms·

That’s exactly the problem I have with all this agent ideas too. Imagine you had a human concierge that is just waiting for your instructions and is as smart or

That’s exactly the problem I have with all this agent ideas too. Imagine you had a human concierge that is just waiting for your instructions and is as smart or a bit smarter than you. Would you just tell them “plan this holiday for me” or “order this food”? I don’t even trust my friends to get this right, why would I give this to someone else?

degamad 1mo ago
Because some people do. Corporate travel is an example. In many organisations, you tell someone in the travel department "I need to be in Tokyo for this conference from Tuesday to Sunday, and charge it to this cost code", and they figure out flights, accommodation, etc for you, with minimal input from you.
- cautiouscat 1mo ago
  If an agent planned a flight for me with an overnight layover, I'm unplugging it. I don't care whose dime it is lol.
  - SV_BubbleTime 1mo ago
    “Find me a cheap ticket from Seattle to LA” … 23 hours in Denver later…
- sgt101 1mo ago
  But, like, isn't that what Expedia does and has done for 20 years?
- sanderjd 29d ago
  Ha, but I always hated when my company tried to get me to do that and ended up spending more time on the phone with the "concierge" than it would take me to do it myself on expedia. And I think most people feel similarly.
- kccqzy 29d ago
  Unless this someone in the travel department knows you and has booked many flights for you before, there are so many unstated assumptions and preferences and hidden utility functions that make that someone unable to find the best solution for you. My employer does have corporate travel concierge who can actually do this with minimal input. But people do not want that. They think about aspects like, if I have a layover at XYZ, would the vicinity of XYZ be a good place for a few hours of sightseeing, given my own travel preferences and previous sightseeing destinations; and would I still want it if it is an overnight layover at XYZ. Or things like, if I fly via this route, I could squeeze another paid day with zero work expectations while I could rest on the plane / in lounges. Or things like, this particular airline has this particular type of aircraft with far better seats than that particular airline, so I would be happier even if the flight is longer. Needless to say, all colleagues that I know of (myself included) prefer to book corporate travel themselves, even if from the company's perspective, spending a few hours to do it is much more expensive than having the concierge spend a few hours to do it.
  - degamad 28d ago
    I agree, but often corporate policy overrides most people's preferences, which is why such processes exist - to ensure that travel arrangements match corporate policy rather than individual preferences.
    - kccqzy 28d ago
      In my experience corporate policy is primarily built to control cost. It will not allow booking expensive flights when cheaper flights are available. But when prices are similar, it doesn’t really dictate much. And in many cases having a corporate policy means just adding a few more constraints: it makes the problem more like a logical puzzle and this can nerd snipe people.
satvikpendem 1mo ago
Plan, sure, many people ask this of AI already, but not actually ask it to buy autonomously.
fwip 1mo ago
The rich fucks who run the show do.
lonrenor 1mo ago
For me, it is not a matter of trust but that I actually like shopping, planning a trip, deciding what restaurant to go to. Deciding what to buy when shopping is a matter of personal taste and not intelligence. A human assistant is largely a status symbol. Most people are not really that busy. The real problem with an agentic assistant is if everyone can have one then it no longer acts as a status symbol.
bronco21016 1mo ago
I think it depends on what you do for work. I'm not going to ask an agent to book my flight for my vacation to French Polynesia. I want to pick my seat and potentially find a deal making an upgrade worth it, choose an airline, etc. But my routine business trips in the CONUS with strictly defined booking options... let me just email an agent "Get there by meeting on day A, leave after meeting day B" and have it sort it all out without the drudgery of the corporate travel portal. YES PLEASE!
- ishtanbul 1mo ago
  A good agent would call you to ask clarifying questions and then actually get you that perfect seat, etc. ideally
- ezst 1mo ago
  By that point, you don't need an AI that boils the oceans and hopefully doesn't confabulate or misinterpret your words, all you need is a better corporate travel portal, which is a legitimate workplace productivity discussion to have, and a solved problem with traditional methods. Ours is effectively close to the workflow you describe: picking dates and time brackets, destination, fine tuning flights and hotel options, sending for validation, less than 10 clicks through information-dense and effective/predictable screens which I wouldn't want to trade for a chatbot and it's usually over the top words salad.
  - skydhash 1mo ago
    Most AI use cases can be reduced to a deterministic listing/form/report format (on the web) or a cli tools.
    - Ekaros 1mo ago
      We have had idea of expert systems for decades at this point. And spend however much on software development. Some how we have failed to reach this in way too many places. Even simplest things like cancelling some service might be broken... And now we want to add some random factor into middle of it all...
trentearl 1mo ago
Claude code planned my recent trip to China. I'm a very experienced traveller but don't enjoy planning. It was a great trip.
- avinoth 1mo ago
  Yeah but the contention is here automating the bookings. Did Claude book the flights, hotels, tickets and attractions for you or would you let it without oversight?
  - trentearl 1mo ago
    Yes it booked everything, I just had to click the final pay button. I did run my itinerary against a fresh session like: 'There are errors in my travel plans, go find them'. It found one issue where I was scheduled to be at the wrong train station.
- sanderjd 29d ago
  But surely you went back and forth on things. I do agree that this is useful to brainstorm, iterate, and then execute.
- patagurbon 29d ago
  I was about to argue against this with something like "soon everyone will just follow the average Claude/GPT generated trip to every destination"... But I realized that this is mostly a strict upgrade to how many many people are planning trips these days. It will probably do a pretty good job of accounting for your preferences, probably better than most/any travel agent unless they're very very local.
ssl-3 1mo ago
As a realistic construct: When I tell a bot to find the best value per volume for a reasonable quantity of unscented Dawn dish soap [so I can buy that], then: It often makes a complete mess of this seemingly-simple operation. (And yeah, that is an actual thing that I've tried to accomplish with voice commands while standing in my kitchen and doing some dishes. It seems very simple, and it did not go well. Maybe when we get the basics figured out we can start worrying about how inept it is at doing vacation planning. It seems that this kind of thing isn't sorted at all, and that this is a very real problem for those who are in the bot business: These missed opportunities leave money on the table.)
- TheAmazingRace 1mo ago
  I think we can safely assume that AGI is still a good ways out then. These AI LLM products really do well on the illusion of seeming intelligent to regular folks, but I'm not fully convinced they can replace human brains... yet. ;)
  - ssl-3 1mo ago
    I mean: That sample was only demonstrative of shopping for dish soap. :) I often get some seemingly-good results in the non-shopping research department, where I'm exploring science and physics; things that don't generally change rapidly. But unlike dish soap, I can't buy the science results that I want[]. []: er. well, ackshually... let's just not talk about that concept right now.
- paweladamczuk 1mo ago
  Funny, I had a similar task for an LLM recently but it succeeded, so I'll describe it: I asked the chatbot (librechat, tavily-mcp connected, kimi-k3) if anybody tests dish soaps rigorously. It said yes. I asked it to find the consumer reports from Germany. It did so, full access is paywalled but it did see the top positions. The I asked it what term to put in evay.de if I want to order. It gave me a string that found the auctions for me. I also asked it what the actual difference is and it described what info the EU law forces onto the label and told me what to look for in the ingredient lists. The process is still involved. I wish I could just do it all by saying "find me another dishsoap, this one sucks". But then would everybody saying this phrase except the same approach to the issue that I took?
Ekaros 1mo ago
And I could bet money on that in short time after someone builds that sort of system the next step is to make it worse. Push worse and more expensive options to user. Or at least those from highest bidder... Anyone involved just can't keep themselves honest so it is doomed to be exploitative.
deadbabe 1mo ago
Plan a holiday, definitely. There are many esoteric things one has to research to properly plan a holiday that I’d rather just not. Some things require reservations months in advance and I’d rather an AI just figure all that out for me ahead of time.
hobo123 29d ago
It's called omakase, or rather aimakase in this case.

degamad 1mo ago

Because some people do. Corporate travel is an example. In many organisations, you tell someone in the travel department "I need to be in Tokyo for this conference from Tuesday to Sunday, and charge it to this cost code", and they figure out flights, accommodation, etc for you, with minimal input from you.

cautiouscat 1mo ago
If an agent planned a flight for me with an overnight layover, I'm unplugging it. I don't care whose dime it is lol.
- SV_BubbleTime 1mo ago
  “Find me a cheap ticket from Seattle to LA” … 23 hours in Denver later…
sgt101 1mo ago
But, like, isn't that what Expedia does and has done for 20 years?
sanderjd 29d ago
Ha, but I always hated when my company tried to get me to do that and ended up spending more time on the phone with the "concierge" than it would take me to do it myself on expedia. And I think most people feel similarly.
kccqzy 29d ago
Unless this someone in the travel department knows you and has booked many flights for you before, there are so many unstated assumptions and preferences and hidden utility functions that make that someone unable to find the best solution for you. My employer does have corporate travel concierge who can actually do this with minimal input. But people do not want that. They think about aspects like, if I have a layover at XYZ, would the vicinity of XYZ be a good place for a few hours of sightseeing, given my own travel preferences and previous sightseeing destinations; and would I still want it if it is an overnight layover at XYZ. Or things like, if I fly via this route, I could squeeze another paid day with zero work expectations while I could rest on the plane / in lounges. Or things like, this particular airline has this particular type of aircraft with far better seats than that particular airline, so I would be happier even if the flight is longer. Needless to say, all colleagues that I know of (myself included) prefer to book corporate travel themselves, even if from the company's perspective, spending a few hours to do it is much more expensive than having the concierge spend a few hours to do it.
- degamad 28d ago
  I agree, but often corporate policy overrides most people's preferences, which is why such processes exist - to ensure that travel arrangements match corporate policy rather than individual preferences.
  - kccqzy 28d ago
    In my experience corporate policy is primarily built to control cost. It will not allow booking expensive flights when cheaper flights are available. But when prices are similar, it doesn’t really dictate much. And in many cases having a corporate policy means just adding a few more constraints: it makes the problem more like a logical puzzle and this can nerd snipe people.

satvikpendem 1mo ago

Plan, sure, many people ask this of AI already, but not actually ask it to buy autonomously.

fwip 1mo ago

The rich fucks who run the show do.

lonrenor 1mo ago

For me, it is not a matter of trust but that I actually like shopping, planning a trip, deciding what restaurant to go to. Deciding what to buy when shopping is a matter of personal taste and not intelligence. A human assistant is largely a status symbol. Most people are not really that busy. The real problem with an agentic assistant is if everyone can have one then it no longer acts as a status symbol.

bronco21016 1mo ago

I think it depends on what you do for work. I'm not going to ask an agent to book my flight for my vacation to French Polynesia. I want to pick my seat and potentially find a deal making an upgrade worth it, choose an airline, etc. But my routine business trips in the CONUS with strictly defined booking options... let me just email an agent "Get there by meeting on day A, leave after meeting day B" and have it sort it all out without the drudgery of the corporate travel portal. YES PLEASE!

ishtanbul 1mo ago
A good agent would call you to ask clarifying questions and then actually get you that perfect seat, etc. ideally
ezst 1mo ago
By that point, you don't need an AI that boils the oceans and hopefully doesn't confabulate or misinterpret your words, all you need is a better corporate travel portal, which is a legitimate workplace productivity discussion to have, and a solved problem with traditional methods. Ours is effectively close to the workflow you describe: picking dates and time brackets, destination, fine tuning flights and hotel options, sending for validation, less than 10 clicks through information-dense and effective/predictable screens which I wouldn't want to trade for a chatbot and it's usually over the top words salad.
- skydhash 1mo ago
  Most AI use cases can be reduced to a deterministic listing/form/report format (on the web) or a cli tools.
  - Ekaros 1mo ago
    We have had idea of expert systems for decades at this point. And spend however much on software development. Some how we have failed to reach this in way too many places. Even simplest things like cancelling some service might be broken... And now we want to add some random factor into middle of it all...

trentearl 1mo ago

Claude code planned my recent trip to China. I'm a very experienced traveller but don't enjoy planning. It was a great trip.

avinoth 1mo ago
Yeah but the contention is here automating the bookings. Did Claude book the flights, hotels, tickets and attractions for you or would you let it without oversight?
- trentearl 1mo ago
  Yes it booked everything, I just had to click the final pay button. I did run my itinerary against a fresh session like: 'There are errors in my travel plans, go find them'. It found one issue where I was scheduled to be at the wrong train station.
sanderjd 29d ago
But surely you went back and forth on things. I do agree that this is useful to brainstorm, iterate, and then execute.
patagurbon 29d ago
I was about to argue against this with something like "soon everyone will just follow the average Claude/GPT generated trip to every destination"... But I realized that this is mostly a strict upgrade to how many many people are planning trips these days. It will probably do a pretty good job of accounting for your preferences, probably better than most/any travel agent unless they're very very local.

ssl-3 1mo ago

As a realistic construct: When I tell a bot to find the best value per volume for a reasonable quantity of unscented Dawn dish soap [so I can buy that], then: It often makes a complete mess of this seemingly-simple operation. (And yeah, that is an actual thing that I've tried to accomplish with voice commands while standing in my kitchen and doing some dishes. It seems very simple, and it did not go well. Maybe when we get the basics figured out we can start worrying about how inept it is at doing vacation planning. It seems that this kind of thing isn't sorted at all, and that this is a very real problem for those who are in the bot business: These missed opportunities leave money on the table.)

TheAmazingRace 1mo ago
I think we can safely assume that AGI is still a good ways out then. These AI LLM products really do well on the illusion of seeming intelligent to regular folks, but I'm not fully convinced they can replace human brains... yet. ;)
- ssl-3 1mo ago
  I mean: That sample was only demonstrative of shopping for dish soap. :) I often get some seemingly-good results in the non-shopping research department, where I'm exploring science and physics; things that don't generally change rapidly. But unlike dish soap, I can't buy the science results that I want[]. []: er. well, ackshually... let's just not talk about that concept right now.
paweladamczuk 1mo ago
Funny, I had a similar task for an LLM recently but it succeeded, so I'll describe it: I asked the chatbot (librechat, tavily-mcp connected, kimi-k3) if anybody tests dish soaps rigorously. It said yes. I asked it to find the consumer reports from Germany. It did so, full access is paywalled but it did see the top positions. The I asked it what term to put in evay.de if I want to order. It gave me a string that found the auctions for me. I also asked it what the actual difference is and it described what info the EU law forces onto the label and told me what to look for in the ingredient lists. The process is still involved. I wish I could just do it all by saying "find me another dishsoap, this one sucks". But then would everybody saying this phrase except the same approach to the issue that I took?

Ekaros 1mo ago

And I could bet money on that in short time after someone builds that sort of system the next step is to make it worse. Push worse and more expensive options to user. Or at least those from highest bidder... Anyone involved just can't keep themselves honest so it is doomed to be exploitative.

deadbabe 1mo ago

Plan a holiday, definitely. There are many esoteric things one has to research to properly plan a holiday that I’d rather just not. Some things require reservations months in advance and I’d rather an AI just figure all that out for me ahead of time.

hobo123 29d ago

It's called omakase, or rather aimakase in this case.