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AI agents: Less capability, more reliability, please

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423 points serjester | 1 comments | 31 Mar 25 14:45 UTC | HN request time: 0.202s | source
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wiradikusuma ◴[31 Mar 25 15:28 UTC] No.43536155[source]▶
Booking a flight is actually task I cannot outsource to a human assistant, let alone AI. Maybe it's a third-world problem or just me being cheap, but there are heuristics involved when booking flights for a family trip or even just for myself.

Check the official website, compare pricing with aggregator, check other dates, check people's availability on cheap dates. Sometimes I only do the first step if the official price is reasonable (I travel 1-2x a month, so I have expectation "how much it should cost").

Don't get me started if I also consider which credit card to use for the points rewards.

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1. baxtr ◴[01 Apr 25 14:41 UTC] No.43547348[source]▶
There is a really interesting book called Alchemy by Rory Sutherland.

In one chapter he describes his frustration with GPS based navigation apps. I thought it was similar to what you describe.

> If I am commuting home, I may prefer a slower route that avoids traffic jams. (Humans, unlike GPS devices, would rather keep moving slowly than get stuck in stop-start traffic.) GPS devices also have no notion of trade-offs, in particular relating to optimising ‘average, expected journey time’ and minimising ‘variance’ – the difference between the best and the worst journey time for a given route.

For instance, whenever I drive to the airport, I often ignore my GPS. This is because what I need when I’m catching a flight is not the fastest average journey, but the one with the lowest variance in journey time – the one with the ‘least-bad worst-case scenario’. The satnav always recommends that I travel there by motorway, whereas I mostly use the back roads.