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Claude for Chrome

(www.anthropic.com)
795 points davidbarker | 2 comments | 26 Aug 25 19:01 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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endymion-light ◴[27 Aug 25 10:11 UTC] No.45037571[source]▶
All of this agent navigation of browsers feels like a self-made issue.

Take the flight booking as an example? Why has flight booking become so obsfucated and annoying that people want an agent booking for them?

Why can't that agent just query an API to get the best available information?

It's just turtles all the way down at this point, when a user wants more fine grained interaction, the agent can design a frontend to visualise the information in a more structured way, then when that inevitably becomes obsfucated due to travel companies noticing a 0.1% reduction in revenue, we need to build another agent on-top of the agent to help further simplify down the information.

Agents upon agents upon agents

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1. fy20 ◴[27 Aug 25 10:36 UTC] No.45037772[source]▶
> Why has flight booking become so obsfucated and annoying that people want an agent booking for them?

Money. The currently process is beneficial for airlines. People end up spending more than they need to, and they profit from it. They have teams who are purposely obfuscating the process to push the average purchase prices up.

It's the same for everything now. Profits for shareholders are priority #1.

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2. endymion-light ◴[27 Aug 25 10:52 UTC] No.45037890[source]▶
Yep - this is what I mean, if enough people begin using AI tools to attempt to circumvent it, it won't be long until the sites themselves become even worse.

The reason why I find AI tools useful currently is that the enshittification has not fully caught up, it's harder for advertisers to spam SEO & pay to have their results promoted within a LLM.

I have no hope that this will remain, it's a transcient wild west phase still, and I imagine in the next few years we'll begin seeing advertising hidden within chatbots as integration increases.

So it's turtles all the way down. Google search used to be good.