Why?

You can pull the PCI compliance documentation from their trust center if you are a partner https://trust.doordash.com/

For addresses, it's a almost certain the agent would see those since those are visible in the UI when ordering and required for selecting a destination for the order

Remember when you were able to take over any Instagram account by asking the helpful support AI to send a password reset to an email address of your choice?

Wow, first I've heard of that. Damages must have been immense for that level of incompetence occasioning financial harm. Or do those laws only apply if you can't hire very expensive lawyers to blame a computer?

> You are completely right! That was my miss, I have no excuse. I've now looked at the docs and implemented it.

Now imagine how triggered you'd be when the AI decides to get you a vegan burger because the chicken wrap is on the second page and it know you're a health conscious person.

This has been my experience too, with Uber Eats. It recommends meat dishes, every. single. time even though I have never ordered a meat dish, even once. This is the absolute basic, minimum help a food recommendation algo should do, and it still doesn't. I wonder why. Maybe vegetarians are too small a percentage of customers for these apps to care?

0. https://github.com/mgwalkerjr95/texas-grocery-mcp

* No affiliation with the above repo, but I'm considering trying it out.

Look, there's a lot of AI excitement and a lot of it is dumb. But if there's a number I can text "hey get me a pizza" and it re-orders the same pizza order I make every Friday night, I'm going to use it. Would I pay for it? As a standalone service? Obviously not.

But if I could delete half the apps on my phone with their horrid dark-pattern-filled interfaces and constant upsells, I'd love that. I'll happily delegate the interfacing to an agent.

And I'd 100% pay that agent to drop the ads and upsells when DoorDash tells it to pass them along.

If I could just ask a single sentence and get back pre-filtered, high-quality answers I would be stoked.

I don't know many Echo owners, but the few that I know (n=2) used it to reorder stuff like paper towels.

from Amazon Faces Moment of Truth on Alexa as ChatGPT Steals Its Thunder (2023) https://archive.is/2jzve

The success of ChatGPT in this space would support the point that AI ordering is a valuable market segment, no?

So 5 people are using it now?

Alexa: Okay, buying Whole Foods

https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/amazon-launches-dash-button-...

My budget app, for example: It’s not easier for me to ask the AI bot “show me all my transactions from McDonald’s” than it is to click on the search bar/payee filter and type “McDonald’s.”

But if I use the AI bot, I’m burning tokens.

And these type of requests consume very little tokens in comparison to almost any programming work.

The UX experience for basically all LLMs that I've interacted with is having the AI sneak in where I don't want it and end up taking 10 extra seconds to do what used to be a 0.1ms operation.

The worst place for AI is in search bars, yet that seems to be the first place every product manager wants to put it. I hate waiting forever to get results because AI is poorly searching in the foreground.

... One wonders if that is due to the great implementation of the bot, or due to the less than stellar results of confluence search.

It does automatically write the PR in the first place but if you delete that description then try to have Rovo make a new one it fails hard.

[0] as of a couple of months ago when I last tried reformatting a slide deck using Gemini (failed) and then Claude (succeeded)

Rovo makes changes I don't want that I have to undo and its "search" is bafflingly low quality compared to the old search experience, but most of all it just makes every page take longer to load and puts annoying UI elements in the way of what I actually want to interact with.

It mirrors every single other in-app AI bot experience I've had to date - less useful than the functionality they replaced with it, slow and annoying.

The only one I’ve enjoyed is Grafana’s. It’s been a joy to use tbh.

The “copilot” instances built into Microsoft’s programs are almost entirely useless due to this.

Those tradeoffs must be considered when deciding whether a feature requires regular software or AI.

"Sorry, I do not have that information."

So then, "Ok, where do I find it?"

"Sorry, I do not have that information."

What the hell? What is this for? Of course, someone will point out "it's because of regulations" or some technical limitation, sure, I can understand that, but then I must ask the question then why did you think it was worth building?

Most (Note: Not all!) questions you get when you work in a "customer service" role come from lazy, unobservant, or dumb people. So pre-AI, a large business needs an army of people to answer the phone and do things like walking confused people through, step-by-step, how to reset their password. "Did you check your email? Did you check the Spam folder? Did you give it 5-10 minutes?"

So AI is sold with the promise that you can just put it in front of your human agents, and then you'll only need 1/5 the staff (let's set aside the unfortunate economic implications for the other 80%) because most people's questions are stupid and trivial to solve.

Problem is, the dummies can't identify and divert themselves to the bot up front, so the person who loses most (other than the CS agents who lost their jobs) is people like you or me, who only contact customer service when we are reasonably sure there is no way to solve our own problem on the website/the app/by ourselves.

Spectrum - we had a voice and a data cable modem (due to location and cabling requirements). Lost the phone service. Called in and the first things I offered them were the MAC addresses off both modems and which one was supposed to be which. That set off the "shit, he knows what he's doing" moment and we got both modems running correctly in less than ten minutes, including IVR and hold time.

Verizon - had a weird ticket that ended up being a NOC issue. Explained the odd backstory of events, a ticket that happened a couple days prior that I was part of a regional outage, and the Tier 1 guy had me hop on a video call to point my camera at my computer at the ONT where I basically did everything without him asking me to (cabling direct, pulling up IP status info, etc, live reboots) and he ran it by a NOC guy remotely and it ended up being a bigger ticket above me. Took an extra day of a regional outage, but that data helped them get rolling.

The next day I get an email at 7pm telling my appointment was successfully rescheduled for 1pm (the same day), none of these match either my og appointment nor the rescheduled one

When I went to the dentist for the appointment the ai assistant supposedly rebooked, they told me there was a mistake and I was assigned a kids dentist.

In the end I had to rebook a third appointment with the receptionist

I switch at the slightest sign of friction.

except it's worse, if you manage to get some info out of it, it could all be just hallucinated, you were told a lie and no one is responsible.

it's like the only purpose is to erect a barrier between the company and its clients.

Of course when you arbitrarily limit the problem domain to some specific example, you can make any tool seem pointless and stupid. It's when you expand your goals to things that aren't trivial that you get benefits.

Do we need not Mathematica or NumPy because calculators can add just fine?

If you're the type who doesn't: probably 90% of the time.

This feels like goal-post moving now, with questions less genuinely curious about an answer and more trying to "get" me. How am I supposed to answer that, it depends on the task and the model and the harness and specific human being using it.

Use it or don't, I don't care, but at least be genuine in the discussion.

There's a huge spec (Level III data) that lets the merchant provide full line item detail with every credit card purchase.

Corporate cards get it, but consumers don't. The payment ecosystem often doesn't even submit it if the card isn't identified as a corporate card.

If you had that, you'd probably need way less "smarts" to build budgeting tools-- no need to try to reconcile bank records with order reciepts.

Eh, I could see a case where an AI makes ordering for a group easier.

i programming stuff using LLM of which the resultant programs are deterministic and dont use LLMs or tokens is a better or easier approach to having gains. because the resulting program can be easier to use and doesnt cost a lot to run. Automations are a good target, or integratig libraries into other programs. tedious things u know well how to do but take time to do manually. then once done fix a problem or workflow that u need fixed by the solution yielded.

ive not seen 1 app that does calls to an LLM that i find useful, apart from harnesses that produce code (which is only recently becoming more appealing and might depend on how good and fast u can write code, at which im not the best nor the fastest.)

Tailoring + proofing resumes to _manually_ apply to jobs is a great application of LLMs in my experience. But I wouldn’t want an AI to apply for jobs for me.

Recruiters said it was standing out in the tech sector. Apparently AI likes to embellish way too much so you don’t trust it.

why? they’re using ai for most of the hiring process. it’s only fair for us to do it too.

I think we’re on path to just do random full review audits of maybe 10% to get a baseline confidence level and then just note it as a risk. Still a large manual task, we’ll probably outsource it.

This is a major player in the industry, not some random kid.

It's just "I want the computer to figure this out for me even if it takes longer than the old tools, because I cannot be bothered to learn how to use the old tools"

I've encountered this a lot

Someone didn’t like how our Jira tickets and Confluence docs were structured so they vibe-coded a new ticketing system that has a custom web UI with a Microsoft Access database on the back-end. Management and Customers don’t like it for a good range of reasons but he requires everyone who works on his projects to use it.

Another person didn’t like our build script for generating a templated Ansible role so they made some kind of MCP adapter or harness to ask you canned questions on what your role is named and what features to include, then scrapes our docs to get the required directory structure and generates it. It does literally the same thing but sometimes does it wrong and consumes tokens regardless.

It’s like the XKCD comic about competing standards, but accelerated for any person who is minorly inconvenienced and has API tokens to an AI service.

I recently setup Muse (just seems to have the easiest out of the box connectors) to connect to all my accounts over Plaid. I can ask questions like: * Review all recurring transactions. * Show overview of last 12 months of spending by category. * Review last months CC transactions. * Estimate next months expenses.

And then in the same app, I automatically get personal financial and budget information that's actual useful. I can adjust the frequency and type of content just by updating the agent's goal.

I tried using YNAB. It felt so cumbersome compared to just asking AI for the info. I had to make a $300 fake expense to zero out an account minimium balance, I can't treat an investment account as a spending account (without some weird hacks).

Meanwhile, the same AI can cleanup my email inbox, watch my calendar, etc.

And I spent like ~2 days having Claude (over remote-control) create a Monte-Carlo simulation for retirement (including Tax calculations). Works great, I can read the code and make whatever changes I need.

The most friction I still encounter is the connector itself being too opinionated. Plaid's API tries to predict future expenses based on what's detected as a recurring charge; this of course was incorrect if similar Amazon.com charge amounts occur on similar days.

IMO purpose built apps are dead. A sandbox of tools that AI can use is far more flexible. Spending $20/month only needs to replace 3-4 other paid single purpose apps (or identify a single $20 recurring service to cancel) to be net-positive. Plus you don't have to configure it, just ask questions.

This is the biggest indicator of the divide between the AI-enthusiastic developer and the average person.

The average person isn’t going to want to sit down and spend two days to fine-tune code or a spreadsheet to accomplish this. They want an easy-to-navigate interface that is dead-simple and ready to go with the ability to get an answer done in five minutes or less. If they hit any snags in the first 30 seconds they’ll ditch it and move to the next solution. Why should they have to spend their time creating a duplicate solution when there are so many ready-to-go alternatives already out there? They want the path of least resistance.

I think for people who can quickly understand and describe systems/code, AI is very magical. So many personal projects would be otherwise too tiring except for the 0.1% OSS developer personality that can spend 4+ hours a day working on stuff. Now AI means many projects can be implemented at the speed of thought.

I'd ask why and they'd just shrug, like *obviously* google is the front page for everything on the web.

Your anecdote is spot on and it feels like the people who are doing things that way are channeling similar energy.

Even apps can be strictly worse than lower tech solutions.

A local car service I can text with “I need a car to airport XYZ tomorrow at 7am” beats every app flow.

i can understand it with the “i’m gonna optimize everything to death crowd” probably eat the same thing every week. i couldn’t do it though, i get bored with the same food. its also why i can’t wear the same sweater every day lol.

It's worth considering whether you really want the full list of MCD transactions or is that just a step you're used to as a means to getting the answer you want.

I think a good chunk of people just do not ever try to understand what buttons do, ever, and it's maddening.

Here you can phrase it anyway you like and even typo at writing mcdonalds won't stop the machine from giving you the right answer.

i think we fell into a bit of mass cult.

obviously some are easier digital, but it absolutely is not always the case.

concert tickets was the one that hit me the other day. someone had given me physical tickets to a show. i just pulled them out of my pocket, they scanned them and … that was it. i hadn’t done an analog concert ticket since pre-covid times so i kinda forgot how easy it can be. no trying to remember which app i used or which password or searching through email… just pulled them out and that was it. and bonus points i have an actual ticket stub.

Maybe I could get train ticket from AI... Or order taxi. At least until it went wrong for the first time...

Agents are great at moderately complex combinations of data and apps. If I had to do this every day or every week even, it might be worth creating a script suited for a task like that using some automation system. Agents are great at providing a disposable saw when it doesn't make sense to stop and sharpen the saw.

I'm not a doorDash user, but they've been doing it long enough to have an app that's probably highly polished. There's not going to be a lot of upside to speaking or typing an English language command to get what you want. Trying to do that is a waste of a well designed app and the agent's token budget.

The purpose of the demo is to show that you Instead it's better to enable agents to access relevant data and actions in a controlled way then it is to do app specific integrations with, for example, a map and navigation app in order to plan group gatherings. Instead it's better to enable agents to access relevant data in a controlled way, and to leave coordination across apps to the agent.

In fewer words: if working with another app could be valuable, leave it up to the agent instead of doing the integration at the app level.

It's not a super repetitive problem (e.g.respond to 100s of messages) and human judgment is highly valued here (what am I hungry for?) and visuals are sometimes a factor.

And I feel like the labs must all know this, so it makes me wonder why they're actually trying to push these assistants onto us. The answer I'm left with is training data — data theft. They'd all violate their privacy terms if it earned them an extra nickel.

This is literally Pizza Hut flow right now: - Go to website, look for deals page where pizza is $10 instead of $20. - Click order, upsell on breadsticks, etc, etc. - Check out, fees, delivery charge, tip take price from $10 to $20. - On the receipt page, get SiriusXM offers.

Sellers are just too incentivized to upsell, and over-charge the less transparency there is.

Same for recipes/shopping carts. Can't trust sellers to optimize for minimum price/maximum value.

I need to see the full menu, with prices and picture of the food and options. Having an agent in the middle is just going to slow me down.

I don't need to see a menu, prices, or options for that unless I want to deviate from it.

Ordering off of DoorDash (or whatever equivalent app elsewhere) in general seems to be the worst possible way to acquire and eat food, in my personal opinion.

Everything on these apps is nutrition-zero junk, filled with salt, oil and sugar, charged at a premium. I ate it in the past, and nowadays I couldn't be paid to eat it. Self-cooked meals beat them in every way, including convenience.

"You can call an Uber with a voice command"

"You can ask alexa to buy you things"

"Your AI will order food for you"

Seem like magical ideas that will remove friction and increase sales. Except that regular people compare 13 different options to pick the cheapest one.

I'm fine delegating my programming work to a clanker, even accounting, but come on. The clanker isn't going to have to deal with the consequences of booking $40,000 airplane trips to hotels full of bedbugs.

     95% chance they're lying
    4.5% chance they're that foolish
    0.5% chance they're so rich they don't care.

I certainly did not have AI do the bookings for my vacation though. Is that what you meant?

I use AI to plan stuff all the time, but then I book it all myself.

Planning != booking.

But yeah im not using to book flights or hotels.

(reusing bullets lists you carefully handcrafted for yourself would probably be better but that is another topic)

Agents seem like they might be helpful for high-friction tasks, with a lot of data. But summoning Ubers and ordering food aren't really that.

The whole point of agents for this kind of stuff is to not have to think about it so you can focus on something more important than a mobile app failing to compute its core function alongside the other nonsense it's doing. And no it doesn't screw up the address either, this isn't 2021 anymore.

This one is not law. That absolutely exists ... but airports demand money for taxis to join that line of customers and so these got more expensive and are never the cheap option.

The rideshare race to the bottom model of pricing has some bad aspects to it, but choice for the driver before accepting the trip is one positive.

I don't have any kind of agent set up to do that now, but to me that sounds like removed friction even if I use it just a few times a year.

I constantly use the Ask AI thing in Google maps to tell it a complex route involving biking and transit and needing to be at a certain place at a certain time. It hasn't messed up on me yet. I would much rather specify the question in natural language than type anything into a rule based UI. In fact I built a toy app years ago that handled a few of my most common queries with the Maps API and I still never used it because of the friction.

siri is horrific

Maybe. But we need to invent a SOTA model that can reliably count to four first.

It's the behaviors of humans when they fight over scarce money that you are describing as "evil".

Humans are the root of all evil.

There are lots of evil behaviors that have nothing to do with convenience.

I don't see money as convenient, honestly money adds a lot of complexity and inconvenience onto my life. What it adds in a good way, though, is power - power to trade hours of my time for stuff I want to buy or services I want to psy for.

That seems incredibly inconvenient, though; you then have to sort it out.

Perhaps you had experience with some old models and crap setups like OpenClaw? But things don’t work like that any more.

I think it's pretty common to actually not want to delegate and just do simple things yourself. It can be satisfying, aside from any of the practical problems it avoids.

Maybe it's a personality thing, maybe it's a learned behaviour thing, but I'm not sure I've met many people I'd imagine being happy just speaking these sorts of things into a phone and seeing what shows up.

This seems really strange to me? I have preferences on seats too, but they largely boil down to “I want to be at the front to deplane faster” and “I want a bulkhead or emergency seat for leg room” and “I prefer aisle seat”. I can communicate those preferences and a human booking my flight can balance them regardless of specific airframe.

As someone who flies between Australia and the US 3-4 times a year, not at all.

I want leg room and the ability to sleep with my head against the wall of the aircraft, but I want to be away from galleys and toilets and not in a seat where the overhead locker closest to me is reserved for crew equipment.

There's so much nuance to these things

"I prefer to be in the back half of the first class cabin if it's a 757, but the front half if it's not, but never book the first or last row of first class (bulkhead) unless it's an A320-family (or another type that has a curtain between first and coach), and I prefer an aisle seat unless it's the last row of first class and the A/C has asymmetric seating in either first or coach (IYKYK), and I don't mind sitting in the back of the cabin if it's on the upper deck of an A380 or 747 (so please don't 'helpfully' move me to a row with a lower numerical value) but otherwise I don't want to sit in the back of the plane, and never book an exit row or the row ahead of an exit row, and only book the row behind an exit after confirming it has the normal amount of leg room and recline, and never book the first row of coach behind premium economy and preferably not the last row of premium economy unless the other rows only have middle seats; and I'm more willing to pay for first if it's a 757 and less willing if any other narrow-body, and don't book a first class seat if the flight is shorter than 1 hour and the premium is more than $25, and never book a middle seat in premium economy unless the only other available seats are in the last 5 rows of the plane."

It is obviously possible to encode that in a decision tree, but, for some of us, it's easier to just look at the seat map and pick what we want.

This proves, yet again, how accurate the AI labs' talk of "money won't matter" is.

It’s kinda vibes based. “You’re at Costco. You last bought X”.

A noteworthy proof of this is the failure of Amazon Dash buttons [1] that blindly ordered your consumables for you. Amazon gave away these devices essentially for free ($5 off with your first order, or some such offer), and people still didn't seem to have been comfortable to use it.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Dash

I really liked the dash buttons for two reasons:

1. It made ordering something you regularly and only buy online anyway easy for an entire household, like for my use case, hookah coals roughly every month.

2. You could place the button next to where you store said consumable and most folks would prefer using it over asking for a link or reminding someone else to re-order.

I do think it was a mistake to launch with an initial limited set of branded buttons for common household goods most people pickup at the store anyway (like detergent) instead of a generic button for my point 1's usecase but thats just plain-old BigTech thinking.

I can imagine an AI agent grappling with all that but the first time a Dash button price gouged me that way I'd throw the thing straight into the trash.

There is still the issue of who is paying for said item and building an open platform that allows another individual to use my funds at the press of a button would require a lot of investment (identity, trust, limits, etc) though I do see the value you are proposing showing a "mini market" to select from.

I never got one, but they certainly made sense in my mind for something like laundry detergent, etc. You notice you are getting low, hit the button, forget about it and 3 days later it shows up and you go "oh, right perfect".

Envisioning the gigolo opening up their nightstand drawer, shocked they're down to their last couple rubbers... slapping the button and getting back to some other slapping.

Yes, you'd need to sort out pricing. I'm unusually price insensitive, but too many sellers play stupid games and win stupid prizes (me shopping around instead of blindly buying from them every time) by changing unit prices too much too often (e.g. my sons preferred shower gel litre price regularly rotates between prices that adds up to a factor of 3 difference, with any given size container at any given time potentially being a massive rip-off). You could fix that by letting users configure price bands and make it pick from a set of products based on price parameters or give an error. Or only include products where the sellers agree to not play stupid games.

But now your UI is massively complicated and you have error scenarios you didn't have before.

Even then, though, the bigger problem is that there just aren't enough product categories where we frequently order the same thing often enough separately from e.g. the weekly grocery run, to be worth it.

In my household I think it basically boils down to shower gels - because I have a teenage son - toilet rolls, dishwasher tablets and washing machine tabs.

That's not nothing, but it's not going to make me order materially more from Amazon to be able to press a button to reorder vs. pull out my phone, press "orders" in the Amazon app, and find the last order I made and reorder the product.

And I say this as someone who did order a couple of Dash buttons when they came out and promptly forgot to even use them (and I don't even remember why).

It's just such a very minor convenience that to work it'd need to have absolutely zero friction, and even then the revenue it'd bring would likely be totally marginal.

> Except that regular people compare 13 different options to pick the cheapest one.

Which takes time... and the AI can do that for you, presumably? Do I trust AI _right now_ to do that _for me_? No. Will people try it out and invariably work out the kinks, for a stable set of use cases? Definitely. Screens are just one UI for ordering stuff. There's definitely a market for doing the same thing with minimal or no screen time.

Beyond time, I will go out of my way to make larger portions for leftovers because I know what's in the food I make, and I try to make healthy food. Even "healthy" options from places that deliver aren't always that healthy. There's an element of knowledge about what I eat that is equal to cost savings in my mind.

Yes but you have to spend time making it beforehand dumbass. (Not saying it's not fiscally irresponsible to get delivery for lunch every day, but you're obviously missing the point of the convenience)

I understand the convenience, and I'm explaining that if you are smart enough to plan ahead once in a while, convenience is overblown.

It is few taps in an app and going out for it when it arrives. Literally. And while you are at work anyway. Cooking, shopping and packing take more time - and at the time when you could have been doing something more pleasurable (like chilling with netflix).

For me cooking is meditative enough that it can be included in "chilling with netflix". :D

If you think about the logistics of running a decent kitchen, the set is quite limited in the first place.

Ah, this is the new marshmallow test, except instead of "can you leave a marshmallow uneaten on the table" it's "can you avoid summoning a taxi to take a single marshmallow to your house".

(Bluesky calls this "burrito taxi discourse"; I do notice that a lot of the people who claim that delivery is absolutely essential to them give an impression of privileged learned helplessness while at the same time claiming to be poor. Perhaps that's unfair, or perhaps not. I'm just a higher earning middle aged professional like the rest of HN, who rarely orders delivery food)

Are you arguing against observed reality? People have not been using AI assistants to buy things. Remember all those smart devices they sold trying to do exactly that? None of them are being used that way.

Really shows why companies salivate over people using these features.

- prevent them from being able to access without going thru the company

— cost them more money

The disconnect was almost comical. All the engineers and other regular employees had "eeew, get it away from me" on their faces, and the sentiment was "how much do I have to pay to not get this?"

The managers, on the other hand...I don't know how to describe it. What they exuded was something along the lines of a religious or probably more accurately cultish experience. They had been on the mountain, they had seen the light, the future had spoken to them, and they were preaching the gospel.

And it didn't seem like they were faking it, either.

This is why you can finance Chipotle orders with Klarna

I want to have 30' time to spend cooking my effing dinner, not save 5' on my DoorDash order. Is that too much to ask these days?

My agent routinely does comparison shopping across various sites to filter out according to my criteria, and even finds coupons - something I never bothered to do.

Certainly feels less gameable than the kind of stuff we already see so much of (like referral bonuses, free sign-up balance, "unlimited" promos, etc)

E.g quick commerce. If I order groceries and a charger and it all shows up in 7 minutes, I will just order it and receive it synchronously, don't need an agent for that anymore than I need an agent to pick it up at my doorstep, that is to say, I don't need one.

Food is async (30+min), so it's useful. Most AI consumer users are young people, and many young people especially living in college, order out every single day, and mostly rotate the same ten options. So it becomes easy to automate. Wherever there is a pattern, you abstract. If it's a one off order for a gathering, sure an agent is pointless. I don't use it when I'm at home either and we order the rare dessert.

Anything which I need to replenish at a certain cadence, and is not available in quick commerce, e.g medicines, I absolutely have my agent order. Once every two weeks the same medicine shows up on my doorstep and I don't have to think about it anymore.

Exactly.

So I have a specialized AI agent that comparison shops for me and tracks prices when I'm placing component orders for my company.

Even the first run isn't too painful, but afterwards you can ask it to write memory files with preferences; and any scripts and tools you write for an earlier search remain usable for later ones of course.

I don't let it place the orders themselves, I'd prefer to do that by hand yet. But recently it finds spec matches and prices better and quicker than I can.

This is kind of handy in today's wild IT market with a customer breathing down your neck asking why it's all so expensive.

(of course the reason it's all expensive is because the datacenters out-bid everyone. But hey, every downside has an upside)

Been in plenty of meetings where lunch and drinks are catered. Either you order enough variety that everyone can find something they'll like, or you take individual orders.

"AI, bring me ${food}" is too nonspecific to ever get you what you want. And as soon as you have it present options, you're now in a flow that would have been faster done manually.

But the wide consensus from most of the industry (including AI people) is that agent shopping is useful for stuff you don't like to shop for (like groceries, computer parts, ad-hoc supplies like paper towels)

But for clothes, and interesting things, where the experience is akin to window shopping, scrolling and imagining what you look like in a particular shirt is actually an integral part of the experience.

Guessing that doordash/ubereats has a part of that appeal, where you get to imagine/visualize the food before you order it.

You think "repeat my last order" is a cognitive burden?

That said, the last mile, the bit where I paid, I called the kitchen manager and talked to them. Even if I trusted ChatGPT with this part, I like building a rapport with who’s serving me and my family food, and it’s a special occasion so I know they want to nail the experience. ChatGPT saved me so many hours of work and research and replaced Google, yelp, and so many other random services.

I don’t think agents are going to work with DoorDash they’re going to replace DoorDash - taking their core competency of helping me discover and choose what’s new and interesting to me, what restaurant is open and meets my criteria and let me stay connected with the people rather than building a wall between me and them

Text is just not a good format for ordering things. You want to see pictures and just click on the options you want - we’ve had people paid 300k working on the optimal visual interface for this for probably 30 years, just trying to improve the sale rate 2%.

Agents are good for open ended problems which require stringing together lots of different data sources, which couldn’t be further from ordering food.

They’ve been around since at least the 90s, but the keyboard and mouse still are dominant.

Will well performing voice models eliminate the need for touchscreen devices?

That only works in Star Trek because it's a plot device. In real life I think that would be insanely tedious.

i feel like you were on the right path but arrived at the wrong conclusion. if you think you're right because the blocking factor is text, you arent paying attention

"Sure, here's 10 options for different food from this restaurant that you totally couldn't have found just by searching for their website instead of writing this prompt!"

0. https://github.com/openshiporg/marketplace

There are many things that agents can do that I would rather do myself.

I do run agents like Meta Muse and Google Spark just to experiment with them, but those are just short experiences.

Maybe people enjoy writing assembly themselves?

There are many things that compilers can do that I would rather do myself.

I do run compilers like C and FORTRAN just to experiment with them, but those are just short experiences.

I also use it to book ubers and uber eats but I check the result first.

I don't understand this logic.

It's going to take time, but it'll happen.

its not hard to prepare food without AI

its not hard to "do X without AI" for about 99.99999% of all different possible cases of X

You can't make proper overview without actually browsing menu of one or two providers. AI at best can sloppify you with wall of text or table that you actually don't want to read, because menus and UI are actually better design than random markdown output.

Then AIncsn have tool to output good summary of menu, but people will not trust that this choice was in their interest rather than minmaxing algo of whoever controls agent.

I consistently get the feeling that I must have a rather more humanist and enchanted view of the world compared to some of you. I see a lot of hyper-rationalist, data-first discussion of the practical issues connected to AI agents when it comes to ordering takeout, but it seems very clear to me that the main reason no-one wants to use AI for this is because a human being's relationship with food - and sourcing food - is really quite ancient and meaningful. In today's hyper-connected world ordering a burger has become almost comically disconnected from hunting for a wild boar, but they are still the same thing in spirit. And handing that over to an LLM equates to the loss of a significant aspect of the human experience.

I think this applies to a lot of use cases of AI that are doomed to fail - not least anything that seeks to replace a human being's creative potential. Why would anyone want to give that up? It's such an important part of existing.

For example, got a new washing machine, had to find adapters, it is so easy to have it find it for me, and then show me a few options. And understand what I need.

Just had it search for bubble wrap and break down what is most cost effective and gets it to me in 2 to 3 days. So easy, and got me off Amazon.

Food? No way, Food is a pleasure if I am ordering it and a splurge. I don't need a machine to help me pick out what taste good. Maybe translate some things if I'm struggling in that language.

I have never seen so little enthusiasm for a project before in my entire professional life, and I've worked on some real dud projects. Literally nobody cares to even pretend they think this crap is useful, any discussion I've ever heard on the topic is people memeing on it. As far as I can tell not even the execs talking about it give a shit, which to me shows how utterly useless the whole agentic commerce crap is

The other day I want to have a 1m cable extension male/female for a XH1.25 It is impossible to find one, because you only find kits to make your own, or a 20 or 30cm one.

I tried with several free LLM, so that they can likely watch much more than I can do and filter all kits, and give the cable I want.

Not a single one was able to provide with a link I could use from my location. They kept suggesting that I shall try these "searches", or products, that were not exactly what I asked.

It is a very simple query, and to be fair, it should be solved at the search box, but it isn't.

The truth is that, if I would let it do it without checking now I would have paid for a kit to make the cable or something else that is not what I want.

Most of the time speaking or writing out precisely what you want in natural language would be more effort than using the systems we have already developed.

None of the IA were useful to work against that anti-user pattern, so at the end I just lost my time, and confidence in assign search task for certain products to IA chats.

Even at my most gluttonous, many years ago, I would order maybe a single takeaway every other week, and when I did that, I'd want to be in complete control to browse and try new things. The only use case I can see for AI is as an alternative to traditional search to work out what some unknown ingredient is, however if I recall, most takeaway apps are just pictures with a name.

People who eat fast food more than once a week need to seriously assess how bad this food is for them. It's overly salted, oily and greasy junk with next to no nutritional value. And for what is it, it is ridiculously expensive. A roast chicken, some potatoes and vegetables costs less than £10.00 and provides up to 3/4 meals, whereas the nastiest, cheapest takeaway in the UK easily hits double to quadruple that cost for something that will one day lead to a stroke.

If the salt and oil is that much of a hook for people, they should realise they can add salt and oil to their own cooking to wean themselves off of delivery food.

I would be very surprised if it turns out I'm the only one

I work for a POS company and was asked about the ACP (Agentic Commerce Protocol) and I told my boss we should skip it for now because of this exact reason. Not anti-AI at all, in fact I've built tools for our clients to manage their menus via LLM ("Add Pumpkin Spice as a seasonal flavor to all my coffee drinks", "Mark lettuce as out of stock", etc) but ordering food does not feel like a good fit for agents as things currently stand.