AI agents: Less capability, more reliability, please

Yeah, the "book a flight" agent thing is a running joke now - it was a punchline in the Swyx keynote for the recent AI Engineer event in NYC: https://www.latent.space/p/agent

I think this piece is underestimating the difficulty involved here though. If only it was as easy as "just pick a single task and make the agent really good at that"!

The problem is that if your UI involves human beings typing or talking to you in a human language, there is an unbounded set of ways things could go wrong. You can't test against every possible variant of what they might say. Humans are bad at clearly expressing things, but even worse is the challenge of ensuring they have a concrete, accurate mental model of what the software can and cannot do.

It's so funny when people try to build robots imitating people. I mean part funny, part tragedy of the upcoming bust. The irony being, we would have been better off with an interoperable flight booking API standard which a deterministic headless agent could use to make perfect bookings every single time. There is a reason current user interfaces stem from a scientific discipline once called "Human-Computer Interaction".

But that's the promise of AI, right? You can't put an API on everything for human + technological reasons.

You can’t put an API on everything because it’d take a ton of time and money to pull that off.

I can’t think of any technological reasons why every digital system can’t have an API (barring security concerns, as those would need to be case by case)

So instead, we put 100s of billions of dollars into statistical models hoping they could do it for us.

It’s kind of backwards.