AI agents: Less capability, more reliability, please

The problem I find in many cases is that people are restrained by their imagination of what's possible, so they target existing workflows for AI. But existing workflows exist for a reason: someone already wanted to do that, and there have been countless man-hours put into the optimization of the UX/UI. And by definition they were possible before AI, so using AI for them is a bit of a solution in search of a problem.

Flights are a good example but I often cite Uber as a good one too. Nobody wants to tell their assistant to book them an Uber - the UX/UI is so streamlined and easy, it's almost always easy enough to just do it yourself (or if you are too important for that, you probably have a private driver already). Basically anything you can do with an iPhone and the top 20 apps is in this category. You are literally competing against hundreds of engineers/product designers who had no other goal than to build the best possible experience for accomplishing X. Even if LLMs would have been helpful a priori - they aren't after every edge case has already been enumerated and planned for.

> You are literally competing against hundreds of engineers/product designers who had no other goal than to build the best possible experience for accomplishing X.

I think part of what's been happening here is that the hubris of the AI startups is really showing through.

People working on these startups are by definition much more likely than average to have bought the AI hype. And what's the AI hype? That AI will replace humans at somewhere between "a lot" and "all" tasks.

Given that we're filtering for people who believe that, it's unsurprising that they consciously or unconsciously devalue all the human effort that went into the designs of the apps they're looking to replace and think that an LLM could do better.