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101 points eleye | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.383s | source
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Nextgrid ◴[] No.45787447[source]
What problem is this trying to solve exactly?

If a computer (or “agent” in modern terms) wants to order you a pizza it can technically already do so.

The reason computers currently can’t order us pizza or book us flights isn’t because of a technical limitation, it’s because the pizza place doesn’t want to just sell you a pizza and the airline doesn’t want to just sell you a flight. Instead they have an entire payroll of people whose salaries are derived from wasting human time, more commonly know as “engagement”. In fact those people will get paid regardless if you actually buy anything, so their incentive is often to waste more of your time even if it means trading off an actual purchase.

The “malicious” uses of AI that this very article refers to are mostly just that - computers/AI agents acting on behalf of humans to sidestep the “wasting human time” issue. The fact that agents may issue more requests than a human user is because information is intentionally not being presented to them in a concise, structured manner. If Dominos or Pizza Hut wanted to sell just pizzas tomorrow they can trivially publish an OpenAPI spec for agents to consume, or even collaborate on an HPOP protocol (Hypertext Pizza Ordering Protocol) to which HPOP clients can connect (no LLMs needed even). But they don’t, because wasting human time is the whole point.

So why would any of these companies suddenly opt into this system? Companies that are after actual money and don’t profit from wasting human time are already ready and don’t have to do anything (if an AI agent is already throwing Bitcoin or valid credit card details at you to buy your pizzas, you are fine), and those that do have zero incentive to opt in since they’d be trading off “engagement” for old-school, boring money (who needs that nowadays right?).

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tgsovlerkhgsel ◴[] No.45787913[source]
One problem with HPOP is the chicken-egg adoption problem: There is little reason to implement HPOP because nobody will have a client for it, and little reason to build a client because nobody has implemented HPOP.

Part of this is the friction required to implement a client for a bespoke API that only one vendor offers, and the even bigger friction of building a standard.

AI and MCP servers might be able to fix this. In turn, companies will have a motivation to offer AI-compatible interfaces because if the only way to order a pizza is through an engagement farm, the AI agent is just going to order the pizza somewhere else.

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1. otterley ◴[] No.45792946[source]
You don’t even need a custom protocol. A published OpenAPI schema is enough to help an LLM-powered agent figure out the right APIs to invoke on the user’s behalf.

I wonder how long it will take for sellers to realize the war against agents cannot be won and that their compute resources are better spent giving agents a fast path to task completion.