botacode

Three things we thought were interesting in this release:

1) New browser sessions in most assistants don't retain (transaction) permissions between sessions 2) Assistants aren't 100% accurate in task completion reporting, yet 3) MCP 2.0 lets servers push updates to clients like ChatGPT plugins or Claude Code Connectors

The release also adds testing tools, opt-in actions, delivery records, revocation checks, bounded sandbox execution, and documentation for 13 other assistant behaviors we've tested for.

It's another small step towards more behavior-emulation-based tests to improve MCP and APIs performance on these new meta-browser tools.

Please do let us know if you, or your agent, have any feedback!

Are there options to replace Gemini with remote models that support ZDR?

Think I'd be willing to take a bit of a quality hit to at least have that even if it isn't fully local.

In a few years we'll cover all the categories! Thank you for taking a crack at it!

We only send your information to insurers we quote you with and do our absolute best not to spam (we send 2-3 reminders depending on policy type), our goal is to never call.

In California we specialize in harder-to-insure homes, i.e. stuff that will place with a non-admitted/surplus policy, the goal is to help keep people off FAIR.

RE: cancellation/non-renewal, these do happen but it could happen to your existing deal too unfortunately. No one will force you to switch if it isn't a good deal and our agents do their best to always advise to the user's best interest. Our goal is to retain you as a customer for life (our agents just optimize automatically for you every year!) rather than make a quick buck one year.

A lot of umbrella prices are somewhat parseable (think a simple-ish decision tree) vs auto and home prices which require reverse engineering rate cards to back into the pricing formulas.

Yes, folks come back at the end of their year. Most of the time their price remains the best (non-issue), when there are better options they switch. Carriers have been great partners so far since we bring them much more business than switches (and when the switches happen it's often because risk management wanted to reduce exposure in that region anyway).

We're eyeing nationwide expansion in 2027 or later this year!

They'll enforce the minimums even as a standalone policy, my understanding is it's that the umbrella always "sits" ontop of something. I.e., they want you to clear the other liability limits before they step in to provide coverage.

It is kind of a huge hassle, especially in states like CA or FL where a lot of carriers have withdrawn and the default bundle option isn't necessarily available. We went looking for high pain X feasibility and this is where we landed!

Emailed yah, thank you for the note!

To answer more directly, yes we do! Most of the umbrella coverage we offer though is of the unbundled variety.

This is great to hear, I'd count this as a success in our book!

After much trial and error, we've come to realize that trying to separate users from their existing insurance arrangements is very hard unless there's some sort of stark event that triggers the switch.

I.e., folks will usually only make a purchase with us if one of the following is true (even if they could save money or improve coverage):

- they're shopping for the first time and want a modern, online-first, service that avoids hassle

- their premiums have jumped

- they were non-renewed

Most users' experience of shopping for insurance has been historically so bad that they're very averse to optimizing it, even if 10m or so could save them hundreds (and in extreme cases thousands) of dollars.

Ironically one of my favorite acronyms

Thank you for the feedback, let's see if they'll let us edit it down a bit.

don't work while driving, you're putting other people at risk by being distracted

There was a good paper documenting this in broader industry, and highlighting how it may account for previous research suggesting good ideas have been getting harder to find. Here's the abstract:

> Relatively flat US output growth versus rising numbers of US researchers is often interpreted as evidence that ideas are getting harder to find. We build a new 45-year panel tracking the universe of US firms’ patenting to investigate the micro underpinnings of this claim, separately examining the relationships between research inputs and ideas (patents) versus ideas and growth. We find that average patents per R&D input are increasing, the elasticity of patents to R&D inputs is flat or rising, and there is no systematic evidence of a secular decline in patenting after controlling for research inputs. We then document a positive, significant, and fairly steady relationship between firms’ growth in ideas (patents) and labor productivity. Average firm growth after controlling for idea growth, however, declines. Together, these results suggest that innovative efforts play a key role in sustaining growth that has not diminished over the last four decades.

https://faculty.tuck.dartmouth.edu/uploads/teresaFort/files/...

Fascinating, had not seen this research thank you for sharing.

This will save a lot of lives! Hope it passes.

The shift is a relic of an older economy and damages folks' lives through worse mental health and driving outcomes [0].

[0]: https://www.coveragecat.com/blog/daylight-saving-time-car-in...

My understanding is that this remains unsettled law. We've added a disclaimer after seeing the big players (OAI, Ant) do the same and focus on ensuring LLMs get things right / outperforms those less specialized tools.

It is a commodity product but, again, the regulatory and capital hurdles to get started are significant. As you scale you need more and the exact reserve requirements are often at the discretion of regulators. Opening a McDonalds franchise it is not.

See for example the minimums here: https://www.insurance.ca.gov/0250-insurers/0300-insurers/010....

The capital requirements and regulatory barriers to start an insurer are extremely high.

A touch of nuance from someone in the industry (CTO at a startup that sells home and umbrella insurance):

Most of the issues here stem from problem the sales as opposed to the claims process. Customers are, structurally, under-educated on what their policies actually cover and this produces unrealistic expectations about what they should file claims for.

Emphatically, this is not their fault but an industry-wide issue that has complex causes like brokers/salespeople getting increasingly squeezed to produce as well as the intense time pressure under which many folks purchase their homeowners insurance policy (folks are often sprinting to check this box to secure a mortgage). Sadly, there is also a strong correlation between consumers experiencing worse socioeconomic conditions and failed claims. This, to me, generally suggests that some behavioral insights should be brought into the sale and management of the financial product to better protect these buyers' interests.

It is important to highlight and understand this point of failure because: 1) claims (even failed ones) are one of the easiest ways to get your rates jacked up as this is a category that insurers are allowed to price on. 2) The common response to articles like this is that "of course insurance should cover more things" but this counterintuitively risks creating more dead-weight loss for consumers broadly in the form of coverage for things that we simply shouldn't be insuring (and instead should be maintaining and replacing).

All that is to say: ask your broker / agent what's in your contract. Do it BEFORE you have a claim to file as in some cases speaking to them (especially captive agents) may in and of itself trigger a claim.

AI-native brokerages (like what we've built) are part of the solution to this problem since well-constrained LLMs can help buyers and users get a much better sense of what their contracts actually cover, and whether or not they should submit a claim.

There is significant value to reducing pollution (in human health and flourishing).

That said, GP comment is intellectually dishonest. It doesn't account for the negative externalities of his choices/politics that, as you correctly identify, are tied to his values.

Great to see more insurance hype! We've been working on AI to solve the consumer search problem in the industry for the past 3 (almost 4) years and it's great to see the big labs getting their hands dirty and building tools for practitioners in the space.

More industry exposure to well-managed agentic experiences will create oodles of opportunities to reduce premiums for consumers and offput some inflation-driven increases in cost of coverage.