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AI agents: Less capability, more reliability, please

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419 points serjester | 2 comments | 31 Mar 25 14:45 UTC | HN request time: 0.432s | source
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simonw ◴[31 Mar 25 15:08 UTC] No.43535919[source]▶
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.

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yujzgzc ◴[31 Mar 25 16:50 UTC] No.43537089[source]▶
I'm old enough to remember having to talk to a (human) agent in order to book flights, and can confirm that in my experience, the modern flight booking website is an order of magnitude better UX than talking to someone about your travel plans.
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1. leoedin ◴[31 Mar 25 19:53 UTC] No.43539127[source]▶
Yeah, I much prefer using a well designed self service system than trying to explain it over the phone.

The only problem with most of the flights I book now is that they're with low cost airlines and packed with dark patterns designed to push upgrades.

Would an AI salesman be any better though? At least the website can't actively try to pursuade me to upgrade.

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2. WesolyKubeczek ◴[01 Apr 25 14:42 UTC] No.43547357[source]▶
An AI agent will likely be worse in that you would have to actively haggle with it so it doesn’t upsell you by default, which IMO is harder than circumnavigating the dark patterns.

An actually useful agent is something that is totally doable with technologies even from a decade ago, which you by necessity need to host yourself, with a sizeable amount of DIY and duct tape, since it won’t be allowed to exist as a hosted product. The purveyor of goods and services cannot bargain with it so it puts useless junk into your shopping cart on impulse. You cannot really upsell it, all the ad impressions are lost on it, and you cannot phish it with ad buttons that look like the UI of your site — it goes in with the sole purpose to make your bookings/arrangements, it’s a quick in-and-out. It, by its very definition and design, is very adversarial to how most companies with Internet presences run things.